Stop for a moment. I ask you to please think about who you dedicate ten minutes of your life to, whether it's someone in your family, or friends, or your favorite series, or one of your favorite artists.
There aren't many, right?
Well, every day millions of people participate in social and market research, giving us access to a few minutes of their lives. Herein lies the greatness and responsibility of our job as researchers.
Have you ever stopped to think about the importance and value of ten minutes of a person's life talking about something that seems relevant to them at that moment?
Are you aware that in the survey you just took, you have access to ten thousand minutes of intelligent life in ten-minute fragments because there were a thousand people who gave you access to their lives?
That is the treasure we have in our hands.
The value of what we access is such that, accordingly, it is fair and intelligent jamaica phone number that we design user experiences where we, as researchers, also put our best version into it. And digital empathy plays a central role in the design of that experience.
What is digital empathy applied to surveys ?
It is both an approach and an application of it.
The approach is to design your questionnaire by integrating the respondent's point of view into your approach. Thus, it can be said that "respondents" are designed using digital empathy .
This approach allows you to get the most out of a subtle force that resides in all people: the desire to be heard . This is the fundamental reason why our profession exists, because people want to be heard. What the researcher does is to accompany this impulse to respond with his questions.
We know that there is a favourable wind that blows continuously, we just have to unfurl the sail and orient it to be led to where we want to go. And this is the second nature of digital empathy, its application . Here are some principles that I always take into account when designing “responders”:
It is more like a dialogue than a form.
It is a journey , from the beginning to the end, and the person has to accompany you all the way, wanting to answer. More than a sequence of questions, it is a system where what precedes modifies what follows.
Radically lean design : not one question too many.
Questions that are easy to understand and easy to answer, both. One is useless without the other. For example: approximately how many liters of beer do you drink per month? Easy to understand, difficult to answer.
Avoid monotony . Repetitive responses (typical of matrices) are overwhelming for the participant. They are boring and -usually- tiring.
Elegant and clean graphic design . Unsophisticated. Graphic creativity should not distract the participant's attention.
Interaction design: responsive (multi-screen)
You may be interested in this article: For small screens, small questions.
Considering these principles of digital empathy, we will be able to design a “responder” that fulfills the function of being that invisible facilitator : it encourages participants to give us access to their lives, without effort. We will see chronological time stretch because fifteen minutes on the clock will seem like ten.