Discussions are highly versatile and used to great effect in online qualitative research, however many overlook the opportunity to deploy online projective exercises to unearth emotional context and enrich their feedback.
When effectively prepared, they can not only enhance community engagement but also increase the quality of feedback and insight - the only limit is your imagination! Further’s MarkUp tool (part of our online qualitative research software) is particularly effective for online projective exercises, and one excellent technique that we have notice increasingly being used, is Pip Wilson’s amazing Blob Tree
(Pip Wilson's Blob Tree)
Fun and stimulating to complete, the Blob Tree can encourage your members to express their innermost thoughts, feelings and desires. This in turn will afford you the opportunity to reveal latent and unmet / unsatisfied needs (e.g. aspects of a client's service or experience that fail to meet the mark, in order to outline future recommendations).
The blob tree can represent any group, organisation or context (e.g. people that travel on a bus, or feelings that might exist towards political parties). Consider asking participants to identify themselves on the tree, or have them describe how some of the different blobs might be feeling and why they are feeling that particular way.
Using MarkUp, your participants can place up to five different pins to ascribe their comments, then once these responses are recorded you (the Researcher) can generate a heat map showing aggregated responses along with any accompanying verbatims and emoticons for your client presentation.
(Visually rich output using heatmaps)
To purchase a group licence and hear more about Pip Wilson's fascinating work, check out the following links:
http://www.blobtree.com/products/group-license
http://www.pipwilson.com/p/about.html
For more great online qualitative research tips check out some of our other recent blogs:
Creating An Online Research Community Plan
Maximising Response Rates And Interactions In Online Research Communities
Community Engagement - Building Better Relationships
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