In the second part of this series on incorporating creative tasks into online qual, Charlotte Evans discusses how to make diary studies and communities more engaging for participants. Both of these tools offer a plethora of opportunities to add visual and interactive elements to otherwise less engaging tasks.

Online Communities and Diaries

In this video, Charlotte explores the way in which creative tasks can be incorporated into online market research communities and diaries. Specifically, Charlotte covers the ways in which diary studies can be positioned as vlogs, and making use of non-standard forms of content in communities. This may involve asking participants to write blogs, mock product reviews or take part in creative, visual exercises.

During the previous video in this series, we previously shared that smartboards and question boards provide a great opportunity to incorporate creative tasks. Another option is diary studies. It’s a simple tool in which participants can add to their online diary that comprises of different questions such as open text and scale questions.

One of the key bonuses of using diary studies is that they encourage your participants to share their experiences across a period of time. I often add creativity to these by encouraging participants to vlog their daily activities. These have worked particularly well to visually show situations such as in-store experiences and product usage when at home. By asking your customers to upload videos, you can step into the day in the life of your customers and use this immersive medium to share your research insight.

If you have an online community, one additional option is to encourage customers to share their own content such as blogs. Blogs allow your customers to creatively share their own thoughts and ideas about your products and their experiences of using them. By inviting your customers to get creative and share in-depth articles, you can dig deeper by asking further questions about the experiences that your customers have shared. This not only allows you to acquire customer feedback, but it also helps you to build an understanding about your customers’ needs and preferences.

Online Research Hints & Tips

The Online Research Hints and Tips series is designed to provide quick, easy-to-digest and actionable advice to help you make the most out of online qualitative and quantitative efforts. Tackling topics that range from participant communication to database management, getting the most out of focus groups to engagement strategies - we're aiming to make the world of online research easier for everyone to understand.