Relevance & Research Question:
People are increasingly accessing the internet with touchscreen mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets. Web panel statistics show that these devices are increasingly being used to complete questionnaires. The unique characteristics of mobile devices require a different type of user-interface, which the standard web interview systems do not offer. The research question is what web panels can do to anticipate to this trend.
Methods & Data:
To find the specific needs of respondents that use touchscreen mobile devices, we conducted several methodological experiments in the CentERpanel. The CentERpanel is a representative web panel in the Netherlands. These experiments were conducted using C-MoTo, a mobile and touch optimized web questionnaire interface that works on top of the Blaise interviewing system.
Results:
Offering traditional web interfaces to respondents that include mobile device users can be problematic. Different input mechanisms as touchscreens in combination with limited screen sizes make some questions hard to be answered by respondents. Especially if questions contain many options, radio buttons can become very small and nearly impossible to select with a finger that is relatively large compared to the screen. For this reason the use of traditional web interfaces is not a good solution for a web panel that consists of web users that use both mobile devices and traditional computers and laptops. An alternative option is to design your questionnaires in two different layouts: a web and mobile layout. This solution would be optimal for the respondents. However the implementation of two different survey layouts can be difficult (the data models should be compatible) and expensive. A last option would be to offer the mobile layout to both web and mobile respondents. The data quality did not suffer from this design for both modes. However, the respondent satisfaction was lower if the mobile layout was shown and the survey design is more limited for a mobile layout compared to a traditional web layout.
Added Value:
Mobile web usage is increasing. With the results from our experiments we have a good base to transform our web panels to a mobile ready web panel.