Our upcoming issue features a focus for the first time on mobile research. To explore this topic, Quirk's conducted a Q&A session with research industry expert Tim Macer, managing director of U.K. consulting firm meaning ltd., regarding the potential strengths and weaknesses of mobile self-completion research. The following is an excerpt from the article, which will appear in the June 2010 print magazine.

Do you feel like researchers are getting too excited about mobile research? Or is the excitement justified?
Some researchers are getting excited about the technology and seeing it as a way that they can differentiate what they're doing from other people, but what I actually see is a lot of researchers being rather cautious about mobile interviewing, due to coverage issues and concerns about the extent to which you can do lengthy surveys. A lot of people seem to be dismissing mobile research as being inappropriate and not really having any potential at all and that misses the point. I don't see a lot of researchers getting terribly excited about mobile research, and I think they could perhaps be a bit more excited because there are some situations where it can really improve engagement among respondents.

How does a product such as an iPad fit into the mobile research scheme?
The iPad is a completely different channel and a device that just hasn't existed up until now. Is it a rather large smartphone or is it actually a desktop or a laptop being shrunk down? It is effectively a laptop that you can use in a social/domestic context in the way that laptops don't particularly sit all that naturally. Although it's obvious an iPad is a mobile device in that it doesn't tether you to a desk or a particular location, it doesn't have all of the advantages that the smartphones and the small-format mobile devices have. It's not something people are going to use on the move. You're not going to be taking the iPad in the street with you. It's difficult even to use them outside where there's sunlight; you're not likely to be able to see what's on the screen, which you usually can with a smartphone. It loses some of those advantages but perhaps has advantages as being something people will use a lot and spend a lot of time in front of.
I suspect that the iPad probably has more in common with the existing desktop and laptop partly because of the size and format of it. What it opens up is the possibility for doing more sophisticated surveys than you can hope to do on a smartphone. You can't show any complex media or stimulus material on smartphones or if you can it's very limited. With the iPad and the other devices that will come along to imitate it, you can show stimulus materials because it is all about media. The iPad is much more conducive to surveys in the way that people are used to designing them.

How can we expect developments such as the iPad to impact mobile research?
What people are learning from mobile research is that most people are participating as if they were doing a Web survey - and that is at home. So in that context, the iPad could work extremely well as a self-completion interviewing platform.

The context for the iPad is slightly different because perhaps the iPad will come to be seen as a device on which you consume content rather than being one on which you create content. The input through the on-screen keyboard is not quite as natural as it is on a PC or a laptop with a conventional keyboard. But perhaps that's a little bit overstated. The virtual keyboard certainly hasn't held people back using smartphones and SMS and effectively using an interface with only nine or 10 keys to type vast amounts of material. I suspect that that isn't going to be such a limiting factor.

Is mobile research as "mobile" as some would like to think?
It's worth bearing in mind that - most of the time - most people who participate in surveys using smartphones are doing surveys at home anyway. It's a myth to believe that when you're interviewing people using mobile devices that they're all out there in the line for the fast-food restaurant or in transit or even in the workplace. In the majority of cases, people will participate in a mobile survey when they're at home. I don't know that that's a big disadvantage; it actually shows that they have control and are taking control of the survey invitation and not feeling that they have to participate as soon as they are invited. Instead, they participate at a time that's convenient for them, and that has to be a good thing.

When designing mobile surveys, what do researchers need to remember?
The big danger - and this is the big trap with mobile - is that it cannot work in the way that people have been forcing what we call "traditional online surveys" to work. That is, with very long interviews. It just won't work. Part of the reason is because it's likely that people completing surveys may be on the move, may only have a limited amount of time and are likely to be more discriminating about the amount of time they devote to it. Nobody is going to take a 30-minute interview on a mobile device. Even if you're using a Web-style presentation, it still needs to be much shorter than what's traditionally accepted. That is a lesson the industry has failed to learn. This is something that was known and understood about Web surveys, and many people have said that traditional online research was an opportunity to ask fairly short questions and to value the respondents' time. Over the years we've seen that largely ignored.

There's no question it's the length of interviews and respondents' remembered experience of being invited to take part in these surveys that are very long and often very boring that has done the most damage to response rates. There is a danger that that then repeats itself in this new medium.

I suspect that this goes back to the relationship between the research company and their clients in that there is tremendous pressure from research buyers to max out on all surveys they do and to try to put everything in there. Nobody seems to be practicing the less-is-more principle.

There are also issues of the small format of the screen itself, which immediately puts limitations on the kind of surveys possible. That has all sorts of implications for survey design. For instance, you can't have very long lists, or if you do have long lists you have to be aware that the participant has to scroll up and down those lists and is not going to be able to see all of the items. That starts to have an effect on the kinds of responses you'll get. If you just take a survey that you're already doing by one channel, such as online, and you just make that into a small format to go on a mobile device you are likely to get different responses because the items may not be visible or not visible in the same way. You have to design the surveys to the format.

Finally, people shouldn't underestimate the extent to which respondents are willing to give verbatim text or answer open-ended questions on mobile devices. Because people are used to using the medium for text messaging and e-mailing, these days it isn't really a problem to have open-ended questions on mobile devices.