Mobile research – or more specifically, self-completion surveys on participants’ smartphones – remains something of a conundrum for many professional market researchers. The opportunities it offers are tantalizing, with respondent-centric benefits such as convenience, immediacy, intimacy (as it is a more personal device) and even fun balanced by some great benefits for the researcher, including better engagement, quicker response, sharper and fuller insights, greater candor and less distortion from delayed recall – which have all been reported by practitioners. The problem is that these gains have to be paid for through a ruthless commitment to brevity. This is the brave new world of the five-to-10-question survey and it is one that calls for a fundamental rethink not just of survey design but of the technology required to support these surveys.

Seattle-based Survey Analytics is one technology provider that has embraced mobile research with gusto. Its mobile offer is styled as a solution for creating mobile communities – comprising four complementary modules for deployment to mobile devices, mobile panel and community, a mobile quali-quant ideation tool and, of course, survey management, design and analysis.

There is always the dilemma with mobile research as to whether the mobile survey should use the smartphone or tablet’s built-in browser or run as an app that the participant first needs to download. Survey Analytics lets you choose because its SurveySwipe will let you deploy your survey as an app that participants can download on to any of the four main smartphone platforms – Android, iPhone, BlackBerry or Windows Phone 7 or above, or to the device’s browser, or mix modes between handheld and desktop/lap-top devices. If that is not enough, yet an-other program in the suite, SurveyPocket, is designed for iPads for offline data collection or where a network connection is intermittent.