Another Fine Matrix

First, look at this full-size. See how there are 14 brands of cat food going across the top? I already told it I’d never heard of five of them, and yet here they all are again. It’s one thing to ask me if I’ve ever heard of a brand and to then, even if I [...]

Needs Moar Choices.

Seriously? Shouldn’t they also have broken out high school by year, or something? Maybe included a radio button for each individual year from kindergarten through law school? No, really, I just can’t imagine how such fine distinctions are useful to anyone. Is someone really looking at this and saying, “Wow, the 7 respondents with some [...]

Is the panel research business model creating a gold farming problem?

Greenfield must be having trouble getting panelists to complete research these days. Maybe it’s the summer blahs, with respondents too hot, too sweaty, or just too on vacation to be bothered.
Then again, maybe it’s something to do with people just getting sick of trying to imagine their orange juice has come to life and is [...]

SSI: Matrixes Make Us Cry, Too.

“We know respondents don’t like grids,” Jackie Lorch, SSI VP, Global Knowledge Management, points out. “They’ve been telling us that for years in focus groups and feedback, but we’ve always thought of grids as a necessary evil in questionnaire design. Now, we’re beginning to learn that not only are grids frustrating [...]

Lolcentives

When you can’t get the incentive you were promised without jumping through seventeen hoops, how likely are you to believe the next researcher who claims you’ll be compensated for your time?

PROTIP: If I Have to Google to Understand Your Question, It’s a Bad Question

Ignoring completely (well, almost completely) the very strange Yes/No selection mechanism on this question, let’s focus on the gibberish instead:

Seriously. I may have, at some distant point in the past, told this particular research outfit that my company uses computers, but I don’t remember being more specific. No idea whatsoever why someone thought defining this [...]

Wow. Just wow.

You’ll have to excuse the low quality of the image here; I snagged it off a WebEx meeting where the presenter flashed it by as part of a PowerPoint he was sharing. I don’t know the source, I don’t know the rationale, I just know it’s probably going to be the worst matrix you ever [...]

Eats, Shoots & Writes Online Polls for Greenfield

…an entire rant about the complete lack of proofreading, quality assurance, and consideration for user experience that has to exist in a corporate culture for something like this to ever be exposed to the general public…

Please Stop Doing This.

I really should have called this thing “matrixes are evil,” instead of “researchcrants.”
Oh well.
STOP IT WITH THIS:

If the question make me groan, screengrab it, and blog about it, you can guarantee it’s making some percentage of your respondents close the tab and get on with their lives.
You are the cancer that is killing market research [...]