Coming hard on the heels of the last release in March, we pushed live a huge set of upgrades and addressed a number of minor fixes in this latest release. The purpose is to strengthen and really streamline user experience – for both the participant and moderators – in advance of some great advances planned for May and the summer.

• Unified form and function for all conversations in the application (stream, task response, discussions and messages). This makes the user experience much more consistent and easy to follow.
• Stream enhancements:
• Ability to probe in the stream, even when the activity is not socialized (e.g. create private comments directly from the stream. This is part of a wider push to address your feedback to make the stream more functional and interactive)
• Ability to mark task responses and comments as reviewed directly in the stream
• Discussions and Messages get a revamp with:
• New Backroom Comments/Tasks
• Ability to attach Photos
• Alphabetical or manual sort via drag and drop
• Ability to hide Discussion topic replies until a participant posts their own reply or to always hide all replies except the participant’s
• Quick navigation between threads while viewing a Message
• Ability to “undo” a message, discussion reply or any comment (includes delayed sending of email notices to allow undo)
• Application-wide Usability improvements:
• Inline editing of replies, messages and comments across the app
• Ability to uncheck the “Completed” state of a Backroom Task in all areas
• Fewer clicks for all uploads (photos, videos and files) plus drag-and-drop upload throughout the application
• New “Mark as Reviewed” checkbox style across entire app (can be undone as well)
• Automatic hyperlinking of URLs and emails in plain-text postings
• Direct iOS 6 photo upload everywhere
• Activity and Task improvements:
• Completion forms now use larger font font size (more friendly)
• Simplified back/forward task navigation during activity completion
• Respondent drop-down moved above task tabs plus many style improvements
• Private commenting area is combined with other comment types
• Preview data is excluded from Overviews unless there are no real responses yet and Image Review charts are hidden when only one marker is defined
• Video Tasks have new default instructions
• Fewer clicks for activity creation and initial task setup (auto-forwards to next step)
• New “Destination” choice on Prompt tasks for journal activities to return to journal view (e.g. to add more entries)
• CSV Exports:
• Dedicated column for each Segment in use by participants found in the report
• Dedicated column for each code used by excerpts found in the Excerpt Report
• Other Improvements:
• Email Broadcast: Filter on people that have not yet completed a single activity
• Summary Stats: Now excludes participant created topics
• Site Appearance: Ability to target any CSS change to one or more languages (e.g. to reveal a unique header per language)
• Site Appearance: Warning now appears when site logo is not good enough for Retina displays
• Plus dozens of minor fixes and many more usability improvements

If you would like to evaluate Recollective, get in touch to schedule a demonstration or free trial site and discover how easy it is to use.

Well we promised there was something huge coming and we’re delighted to announce today that Ramius is launching Recollective HIP, the world’s first Holographic Insights Platform.

“It’s the result of some incredible thinking by our engineers and product designers,” said Alfred Jay, CEO and President of Ramius Corporation. “With Recollective HIP, we’re truly pushing the boundary of what is possible with online research. The combined hardware and software innovation in this release is breathtaking.”

Recollective HIP is a new task type in the existing Recollective platform. It works by utilizing a small device that is plugged into the base of any smartphone, or the USB port of a computer. Just like something out of Star Wars, this device projects a 3D holographic video image that participants can manipulate through a range of “Kinect-style” gestures and movements. The result is a truly immersive research environment that offers limitless opportunities for gathering insights.

“Imagine providing a research group with a holographic conceptual design of a new product or packaging,” said Philippe Dame, Chief Operating Officer at Ramius. “Now imagine each person can handle it, really get a sense of it in three dimensions and give immediate feedback. That’s so powerful, I can’t wait to see what our customers do with this technology.”

Ramius has already signed up several early customers to try Recollective HIP and will be publishing the results of those studies in the coming month. After that, the new task type will be available for commercial use in May 2013.

For more information, contact Ramius sales on 1-888-APRILFOOL

Just before the new year, Ramius quietly celebrated the first anniversary of our Recollective software’s commercial launch. That first year was an incredible learning experience for the Ramius team and we continue to gain a tremendous amount of feedback from our customers and prospects on each and every project. Everything that’s been shared with us contributes to improvements in the software, supporting services and helps us to envision how to innovate Recollective into a vital online platform for research and insights in the months and years ahead.

We’ve seen a shift over this first year in project size. We initially found a typical study involved approximately 50 participants and most often lasted for one or two weeks. As the year progressed, the typical number of participants remained at a similar level but we found the study duration extended to one month or longer. On many occasions we also saw that Recollective was being used in a sequence of projects. Sometimes, this involved numerous phases of online qualitative research, all done on Recollective. Other times, Recollective served as the online qual platform in a study that preceded or followed quant work. We also saw a number of very large continuous communities launched on Recollective, used by agencies to provide their brand clients with as-needed consumer insights.

We were interested to understand this shift and whether it was as a result of the platform maturing, the market evolving or simply our customers becoming more comfortable using Recollective. 
Not surprisingly, after looking at all the projects we completed and talking to many of our Recollective customers, this shift appears to be a result of all of those reasons.

At launch, the platform was most easily understood and categorized by researchers as being from the bulletin board family. Accordingly, early projects were often designed as short bulletin board studies. As the year progressed, we saw research designs incorporate more activity-based approaches as researchers learned how to take advantage of Recollective’s activities and tasks engine for immersive research exercises.

Towards the latter part of year one, our market research agency partners were able to pitch and win more community-oriented engagements with their clients based on Recollective. When asked, they indicated it was partly due to there being more community-projects available and their confidence in the platform strengthening with more features to want to conduct longer studies with increased participant engagement.

FEWER/SHORTER STUDY EXAMPLE

The typical nature of a 50-participant, 2-week Recollective project involves something like insight needs for a client’s innovation and product development processes. The business functions are involved in generating and gathering ideas to develop into a new product or service and will have questions that research can help answer at various times.

It’s a familiar pattern: an agency is commissioned by their client and conducts a study. The agency debriefs the client with findings and the client integrates the new insights into their thinking. Later, as new questions and budget emerges, the client commissions a follow-on project with new questions. Sometimes, a follow-on project may integrate a survey along with Recollective’s qualitative capabilities. Essentially, this kind of project maps directly on to a common process for satisfying marketing research needs by hiring agencies to answer questions via small projects.

A specific Recollective example is a case where our agency partner worked with a global telecommunications company to conduct studies of the lifestyles of its target consumers — the data was useful to the business team as the product concept was being developed. Later, a follow-on project was done to have these same consumers test and give feedback about the actual product but this time feeding back to both product managers and also the marketing team.

LARGER/LONGER STUDY EXAMPLE

To provide an example of how a similar end-client can use a longer-term study, we can stay in the telecommunications industry. A Recollective partner used the software to power an online community / sounding board which was established with 400 US-based customers following interviews and focus groups.

The business focus of the longer duration online research community was to inform its business decisions about streamlining customer service systems and processes. For example, the community was consulted to:

• identify areas where systems and processes could be improved
• ensure consistency and excellence at points of customer contact
• provide insights to help develop new customer support tools, systems and processes
• test and optimize customer communications

Some key advantages of moving to a longer ranging community approach included:

Ideas from internal and external sources
A continuous community approach supports a customer-centric business. While we saw small projects commissioned to understand a consumer segment or to test product concepts, the community approach is being used even earlier and throughout the various product development process stages with customers being involved early on to suggest product ideas and improvements.

We’ve seen studies that involve panels representative of target consumers to recruitment of samples from among communities of passionate and enthusiastic customers (and, in the example mentioned, customers who were detractors).

From standalone projects to continuous insights
Business units can gain insights faster when they have a ‘sounding board’ of customers to poll compared to the normal process of initiating a new study project (e.g. write business requirements and RFP, select agency, agency recruits, runs study, reports, etc.). Quicker feedback empowers the business function with insights to make better informed decisions, potentially getting to market faster and reducing rework.comm

Research as engagement
In a longer ranging community, insights which resulted in something being actioned by the company help the participant feel that their opinions mattered, bridging the gap between marketing and research by strengthening loyalty and encouraging positive word-of-mouth promotion.

Technology provides a high degree of flexibility by allowing for multiple methods over longer time frames
Modern online research platforms allow for a variety of methods to be used to gather insights. For example, using the social features in Recollective, we’ve seen participants begin interacting with one another in discussion forums and raise questions not even considered by the end client. Then, with more time to interact, researchers are better able to design and execute follow-on activities to test and confirm insights gleaned from discussions and earlier exercises, adding to the overall value delivered to the client.

Of course, these are just some of the reasons why researchers continue to increase the time and participant numbers for their online qualitative studies. We’ll continue to monitor this trend and will share more examples with you as we continue on in Recollective’s second year!

Often one of the first things participants see when they login to a Recollective study is the stats bar on the summary page.

To admins this bar gives a high level look at the status of the study. You can see what percentage of your participants have logged in, how many total study visits there have been, the number of completed activities, comments and ratings, and the number of discussion posts.

To participants this bar tells them about their own activity in the study. They can see how many activities they’ve completed, how many times they’ve logged in, the number of ratings and comments they’ve made and how many times they’ve posted in discussions. If they have any overdue activities we’ve highlighted this section in red in the hopes of alarming them into completing them!

Feedback indicates that both admins and participants love this feature. It helps admins to take the pulse of the study and it gamifies the study for participants. It’s amazing how many participants strive to get their bar up to 100%!

Despite it’s popularity with admins and participants alike, in my opinion this feature is underused. The default is to display stats for the entire duration of the study, however this can be updated to display stats for preset date ranges (eg. past 7 days, past 30 days, this month) or if this doesn’t do it for you, you can create a custom start date to begin the stats on.

These options are particularly useful for longer duration studies, however they can be applied to shorter projects as well. Since we know participants respond well to the stats bar, it could, for example, be reset every week or even every day. This will engage your participants as they strive to reach 100% completion each time it is reset. As a best practice, and to avoid an influx of support emails, I recommend letting participants know when and how often the bar will be reset.

Have you had enough of summary stats yet? I didn’t think so. Here’s a couple more stats bar tricks for you.

The Disappearing Stats Bar

Do you love the stats bar but are afraid it may be distracting, confusing or create unnecessary concerns for your clients? We completely understand and have built in a permission to hide it from all client accounts assigned to the study. To make this change edit the study settings in the side panel and make sure the View summary tab statistics option is unchecked.

Now that it’s hidden from your clients, the next inevitable question is: what about the participants? Don’t worry, we’ve covered this as well! If you’d like to hide it from your participants there are two easy ways to do so. The first is by selecting the Summaries button in the right corner of the summary tab and choosing the Hide Statistics option. The second is by selecting the action menu next to the summary statistics section header and choosing the Hide Section option.

Both of these options will hide the summary stats from your participants, your clients (if they’ve been given permission to view them) and even from you. If you’d like to bring them back follow the same instructions, but select either the Show Statistics or Show Section option in these dropdown menus. Although every other section on the summary tab (summary header, current activities, recent responses and topics for discussion) will behave in the same manner, there is one difference with statistics when they are turned back on.

Once re-enabled, there is a link next to the section header that will save this option for your participants. This means if you’ve hidden the stats from your participants you are able to temporarily turn them on so you can check the pulse of the study, but be confident that participants won’t notice this momentary change to their summary page as well. Clicking the Save as default for participants link will enable the stats bar on your participants’ summary pages. If you do not click that link then whenever your page is next refreshed the stats will disappear.

Did we miss anything with the stats bar? Can you see any areas where it can be improved? Add a comment to let us know what you think.

It’s December! The days are shorter, the weather is colder and we’re beginning to look forward to the holidays! December is also a good time to reflect on what has happened in the past year and to plan ahead for the new year.

In 2012, the marketing research industry buzz about online communities continued. As commented in the Spring 2012 GreenBook Industry Trends (GRIT) report, “. . . Online Communities are already mainstream”.  While that may be true, the technology to power an online community for insights might not yet be in your toolkit. In this post, I’m going to share what one of our clients learned about online communities in their first foray earlier this year.

In the summer, Ramius partnered with a market research agency and their client, a major grocery retailer. The client was interested to experiment with online communities to understand what the method could bring to their research needs. Since the agency had many years of experience moderating focus groups and online discussions, we collaborated to combine Ramius’ Recollective offering with their expertise to meet the client’s objectives.

The project chosen by the grocer was to understand the big-box store phenomenon: why and how consumers shop there. It involved a national survey of consumers followed by focus groups into which a three-week online research community was incorporated to discern new insights. It meant that the client and agency could compare and contrast their online experience to the traditional focus group method. Some interesting findings came from the project.

Communities afford opportunities for wider exploration of issues

In contrast to traditional qualitative research techniques, in an online community you can expect to be less time constrained and respondents aren’t so limited for how they can contribute. For example, a participant could start their own online discussion thread and get right to the heart of what matters to them rather than wait for the focus group moderator to direct a question to her. In this project, the researchers had a full 3 weeks to delve deeply into responses and discussions to meet the client’s brief, yielding rich data and allowing for more complex analysis.

Variety leads to better engagement

The Recollective platform has a bulletin board function for moderator and/or participant-led discussion. As well, Recollective provides an engine to deliver structured research activities including diaries, mystery shopping, brainstorming, rankings, card sorts and open-ended text and photos. We found that by presenting a variety of activities, the degree to which participants are engaged in the community increases; participants will at least complete those activities well-suited to their abilities, interests and time.

For example, in the mystery shopping exercise, some participants favored video responses – one participant even filmed an interaction with the mystery shopped store manager. Others preferred to contribute feedback in a written form. The learning here was to respect and facilitate the variety of end user preferences to maximize the insights gathered from the community.

Open-ended queries elicit greater depth and creativity of response

The researchers designed an exercise where it asked respondents to use images to express perceptions of a grocery store. Using stock images, they received somewhat expected answers. By allowing the participant to find and share their own image, researchers anecdotally found responses of greater depth and creativity. The answers lead to novel and unexpected paths that could be potential future research topics.

Socializing responses

Recollective has a modern, intuitive design similar to modern social networks like Facebook. This includes “social features” that encourage study participants to interact with each other. For example, it has an newsfeed to shares participant responses with other the wider community which the project found stimulated insightful discussions because there are more opinions and content to build upon.

Recognition and reward

Recognition is a commonly identified community effect that also worked well in a short term community. A “Star of the Week” respondent was singled out, based on response quality, frequency and quantity of contributions. This encouraged and motivated other participants to also strive for such compensation and recognition.

Incentives were used in the study and were associated to the completion of activities. To encourage participant-led discussions, rewards were based on not starting a topic, but that the topic resulted in other participants contributing to the new thread.

Be real with the participants

The researchers added video instructions which made the study a more personable experience for participants. They actually could see and hear the team behind the project. Where appropriate, key findings were fed back to participants who were interested in what the results were.

Apply community-based techniques to appropriate solutions

At the end of the study, both the researchers and clients were impressed with the possibilities of online community-based research. It yielded a lot of information that can lead to other future research topics. Certainly there are some situations that it’s not suited to, but in conclusion we discovered it’s very applicable to:

• exploratory research projects
• longitudinal research (multi-phased product development, in-home testing over time, purchase processes, behaviors)
• testing (concepts, communications, ads, etc)
• reality checks
• group ideation, co-creation and crowdsoucing initiatives

For more information on this case study, contact Ramius on salessupport@ramius.net.

Recollective will very soon include a new, visually-rich task type called “Sort and Rank“. The task type is variation on a single-choice grid question whereby a series of “cards” can be placed into one or more “groups” by participants.

Cards and groups are defined with text and an optional image. Each card can be placed into one group and a group can hold many cards. What’s more, within a group, cards can be ranked and to aid participants, a scale can be defined for each group (e.g. “Most Sour” to “Least Sour”).

As done for other task types, completion of the Sort and Rank task type can be accomplished on any mobile device without degradation of the activity’s visual richness. Each task submission is neatly summarized in the response stream and a rich overview area is provided for analysts with customizable charts and exportable data.

In a simple example, a group of 10 cards could be defined with only a single group. Participants could be asked to rank only 5 of the 10 cards by placing them into the group in a desired order. A more complex configuration will have multiple groups which allows items to be categorized and then ranked within those categories.

We expect to see a lot of innovative use of this new task type and will expand its capabilities based on your feedback.

A question posed a handful of times in the past few weeks is how to create a backroom comment in Recollective. We’re expanding the backroom commenting capabilities in a future release but for now, this post describes some good practices for backroom comments applied to task responses and excerpts.

Task Response Backroom Comment
The first and most common backroom comment is tied to a task response. To add them you must first navigate to a task response. To do that, click on an activity card and either select a task card or an participant’s name in the Activity Response Summary table at the bottom of the page:

Clicking on a task card will bring you the first response for that task. Alternatively, clicking on a participant’s name opens their response for the first task in the activity. In each scenario there are two comment textboxes beneath the participant’s task response:

The top box is where you can add either Open Comments (visible to anyone who has permission to view that task response) and Backroom Comments. The bottom box is where you can send a private message (probe) to the participant.

To add a backroom comment, select the Backroom Comment option on top of the first comment textbox (you will notice the box turn red), enter your comment and press the Add Comment button.

Excerpt Backroom Comment
To apply a backroom comment to an excerpt, you must first create the excerpt. This is done by selecting a portion of user submitted text with your mouse and clicking the Save Excerpt option in the menu that appears. The Coded Excerpts section of the side panel will automatically open, enabling you to apply codes to your excerpt and add a backroom comment:

Backroom Comment vs. Backroom Task
In both scenarios described above you will notice that underneath the text input fields there is a checkbox labelled “Make this a backroom task” that, by default, is enabled. Keeping this enabled will turn your backroom comment into a “to do” item. This means the person creating the task is either asking someone else to do something (eg. “Please probe more on this response”) or are setting a reminder for themselves to do something.

If you don’t want to create a backroom task and are merely commenting (e.g. “This is a trend we’re beginning to see more often”), uncheck that box to avoid creating a task.

Backroom Comment Notifications
All backroom comments and tasks are easily accessible in the Backroom section of the side panel:

This list shows, in reverse chronological order, all backroom comments made within the study. You can use the options at the top to filter that full list to show outstanding or previously completed tasks.

You can click on a item in the list to be brought to the original task response or excerpt that the backroom comment was made against. For tasks, once they are complete, click the “Mark as Completed” link to move the task from your To Do list to your Completed list. This helps you keep on top of any outstanding tasks to do within the study.

Do you have any suggestions for improvements to backroom comments? Please add your suggestions by commenting on this blog or submitting a feature request directly from your Recollective study (click the Feature Request option in the side panel).