OTX — or the “Online Testing Exchange” is a market research company that does research online (alright, who doesn’t?). I happened to receive an invitation to one of their surveys today and had a couple of comments.

First, OTX gets props for several things. First, they share a lot of their research results If you go to their web site, you can read all about teen shopping habits, teens and cell phones, movie survey results, etc. They seem to do a lot with kids and teens, which isn’t surprising given the cuteness of their interface (which I’ll explain in a moment).

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About a year ago Tim Macer gave a presentation at the SPSS Directions Conference entitled “Weaving, not drowning: An update on take-up and best practices in Mixed- and Multi- mode research.” Long, perhaps even academic sounding title, but actually extremely relevant to folks trying to figure out how to conduct and combine multiple modes of research (phone, web, paper, etc). In his presentation, he agenda covered the following questions:

• Who is doing it, how common is it?
• Why are they doing it?
• Why are some other people not doing it?
• Which modes work best together?
• When does it make sense to switch modes?
• What impact does it have on the data?
• What are the technical requirements?

One really neat concept I hadn’t thought much about was the idea of having a respondent start the survey using one mode (perhaps paper or the phone) and then have them finish the survey in another mode (usually the web). This has been found to help out when it is hard to retain respondents in one mode using a particular data collection method (perhaps they don’t want to hang out in your store for 20 minutes, or maybe they just want to get off the phone).

Multi-mode data collection will become especially useful as we adopt more mobile survey solutions — perhaps have the user start with a WAP based survey and finish up with a web based survey when they get home.

Read Tim’s full article at Meaning (PowerPoint).

For those of you tired of simple multiple choice radio box, check box kind of online survey questions, RelevantView has created a new online survey tool that offers the ability to have users participate in an online card sort much like what they would experience if they were participating in a real-life exercise.

Although I can’t tell from the image precisely what technology is being used to power the sort, it does have a very Web 2.0 feel to it that hopefully gives a sense of the types of fancy new user-friendly online survey technologies we can expect to see in the future.

Read the press release.

David Tebbut of IWRBlog (Information World Review) recently posted some interesting observations about Confirmit’s dashboard application, in which an online survey system is used to track customer attitudes in real time and report the results in an automatically updated "dashboard" application. The idea is to be able to provide useful research results instantly — as soon as they are relevant — instead of having to wait hours, weeks or days for results.

In my own experience, the greatest challenge to this type of a dashboard — which in some ways speaks to the potential to integrate customer satisfaction directly into a balanced scorecard type system in a meaningful way — is the ability to collect enough data on a regular basis to cause the "dials" on the dashboard to reflect something meaningful. 10 or 15 responses a day are simply not enough for a system that is meant  to be continuously updated.

On the other hand, there are applications where such a system might be somewhat useful and relatively easy to "keep fed." For example, if on the way out of the store there was a single question that customers could answer — either as they walked out the door or as they checked out — and if there were enough registers in the store — it might be possible to collect enough data to make the dashboard meaningful. Or maybe if there were a way to ask the question on customer cell phones as they walk out of the store (perhaps a little less realistic).

Read more about this article at IWRBlog.

Mario Menti of msurveys.com recently posted a note on his blog describing how easy it was to create a survey, solicit responses, and then compensate the respondents in SecondLife. A very interesting, unique and possibily even useful experiment to be sure.

Second Life is a virtual community much like a massively-multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) such as World of Warcraft, Everquest or Star Wars Galaxies except that instead of fighting monsters and completing quests your objective is…well…there isn’t really one. You buy property, meet people, simply fly around or create things. In fact, using the basic building blocks provided by the software you can create just about anything if you have enough patience and skill.

While most people build digital representations of physical things (like buildings, sculptures or stargates). Mario used his time and skill to create an online survey. In fact, he even set it up so that individuals who finish the survey are rewarded with in-game money.

Think about this in context with the recent findings of the Pew Internet & American Life project, where 52% of a broad-based, national sample agreed with the following:

"By the year 2020, virtual reality on the internet will come to allow more productivity from most people in technologically-savvy communities than working in the "real world." But the attractive nature of virtual-reality worlds will also lead to serious addiction problems for many, as we lose people to alternative realities."

The entire report (entitled "The Future of the Internet II") is fascinating and contains a number of interesting predictions for the future (along with what people thinking of them). Definitely worth a read.

I love Mario’s experiment. And while it is probably true that it is just a little too early to jump on this technological bandwagon (unless you’re trying to do a survey about virtual communities and the people who use them, it is probably going to be difficult to come up with a sample that is relevant to your research questions) I think the time won’t be so far off when data collected in environments such as Second Life is the norm.

Read about Mario’s Second Life survey experience on his blog.
Watch a video of someone completing the Second Life survey.