Online qualitative research is a great method for sourcing ideas, supporting business decisions and shaping strategic goals. But to participants, it can often seem dull and uninspiring. To capture imaginations and more thoughtful responses - creative tasks can be an especially useful tool.

Smartboards, Question Boards & More

In this video, Charlotte Evans explores three different creative approaches that can be used for this very purpose. Over the course of just a few minutes, Charlotte talks through the benefits of smartboards, co-creative question boards and projective techniques.

Integrating creative tasks into online market research is a great way of starting a conversation with your participants and making your research more appealing to take part in. Let's take a look together.

A great, creative tool to work with is the smartboard. These are an interactive format that encourage collaboration. Smartboards enable you to show imagery to your participants who can then add their sentiment feedback markers to it.  Once fieldwork is completed, the heat map that you generate from this is also an effective, creative visual that you can share with your key stake holders.

Question boards are another way that you can add creativity to your research. Providing a space for two-way discussions between you and your participants, this tool is brilliant for adding your creative techniques to. Within question boards, projective techniques are just one of the many creative tactics that can be deployed. By using them, it can help you to achieve better insight as they allow you to dig deeper and help you to understand your participants’ unconscious motivations. You could choose to use these when developing new products as they help you to uncover consumers’ unmet needs.

One way that projective techniques can be used is by sharing scenarios and asking participants to create and upload images of idea storms. This is a fun and brilliant way of encouraging your participants to share their ideas and brings new perspectives to your discussion.

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.