Archive for the ‘David Ward’ Category
Friday, February 12th, 2010
This week, David Ward explains how a little extra thought could go a long way for some of our prospective clients.
I am colour blind. To be honest, I am so colour blind that my 6-year-old daughter takes great pleasure in telling me I’m getting my reds, greens and browns, my blues, purples, pinks and greys all of a muddle. As we sit down to do some drawing together, more often than not the scene taking shape on the page is eclipsed by the alien-looking purple sky or dry, parched-looking brown grass as though some prolonged drought has been in full swing for several months. I’ve lost count of the number of fouls I’ve given away playing snooker when I’ve inadvertently potted the brown thinking it was a red. I’ve long since given up looking for red tees against the green grass on the golf course. I long ago got used to the strange looks that shop assistants give me when I ask them what colour a particular item of clothing is. In short, it’s a frustrating problem. However, it’s hardly a life threatening one and to my nearest and dearest it’s a source of some entertainment.
Depending on where you look for the figures, between 8% and 12% of the male population are colour blind to some extent and a very small proportion of females are affected. One way of testing for colour blindness is the Ishihara test. Here are a few examples from that test.
What can you see? For the record I can see a 25 in the first circle. In the other three circles I see dots and nothing else. In the other three circles I should be able to see the number 45, the number 8 and the number 6.
I’m no expert on eye-related problems so I tried to find a simple explanation of the reason for colour blindness and http://www.wisegeek.com/what-causes-color-blindness.htm provided a good one, I think.
Colour blindness is a result of certain cones on the retina misinterpreting the wavelengths that correspond to their respective colours. Red, green and blue colours have corresponding wavelengths. Red wavelengths are longest, green colours generate medium wavelengths, and blue colours are made of shorter wavelengths. If the green cones, for example, only respond to slightly longer wavelengths, green will be interpreted by the brain as red.
I don’t need to tell you that the web is an established way of advertising, reaching new customers and selling products, but how much consideration is given to the design of the colour schemes? Being faced with a website that hasn’t used a well-thought-out colour scheme that takes us colour blind folks into consideration could be costing you. For example, according to the last census in 2001 there were 28.6 million males in the UK, and with around 12% of males being colour blind that’s potentially 3.4 million males that may be put off from using a website purely because of its colour design.
The message for my Thursday Night Insight this week is simple. Although it’s often not a serious issue, please don’t forget about people like me that struggle when it comes to the world of colours and making distinctions between them. It’s not a difficult thing to take into consideration and there are 3.4 million in the UK alone that may just thank you for it.
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Friday, November 13th, 2009
David Ward this week takes the time to point out that in marketing, just as in many aspects of life, timing is everything.
A disturbing thing happened to me about 2 weeks ago. But before I tell you what that was I wanted to share with you something I read in an edition of New Scientist from the 24th October. The article looked at how the brain perceives time. Have you ever noticed how sometimes particular events in our lives appear to happen at differing speeds? If we are having a bad day where things are going poorly, the day can seem to last an eternity. On a good day it can appear to speed along and, before you know it, the day is over.
In one experiment carried out by David Eagleman at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, a man was dangled off an eight-story-high tower and dropped. After a drop of several seconds, he landed unharmed into a safety net below. Eagleman wanted to know whether during the drop or extreme events the brain’s clock accelerates, making what’s happening around us appear to happen much more slowly. Other than this experiment, the article also discussed how we perceive what happens around us as series of frames rather than a continuous stream and we collect information through discrete snapshots.
“Time,” as Eagleman puts it “is weirder than we think it is.”
I said at the start of this Thursday Night Insight that something disturbing happened to me about 2 weeks ago. No amount of peculiar perceptions or warping of time could account for it. I am sure I experienced what I did and I refuse to be told otherwise. And what was it that I experienced, I hear you ask? At the end of October, in a coffee shop in Bramhall, I heard the unmistakable sounds of Christmas music coming from the speakers. Yes, that’s right. Christmas music. Even before the celebrations of Bonfire Night were upon us, there it was, Christmas.
Now this isn’t a tale of Bah Humbug on my part. I happen to not mind Christmas one little bit. It has its merits. With presents, time off work, time spent with the family, and a special time religiously for some, what’s not to like? Christmas, however, seems to be rammed down our throats earlier and earlier each year. Unlike the Americans, we Brits don’t have a barrier such as Thanksgiving to provide us with a shield to the festive season starting too soon. Now, 2 weeks after the first disturbing signs of Christmas, the commercials on TV are increasingly becoming Christmas themed. By the time the big day comes around it’s a wonder we’re not all sick of hearing about it. I don’t know, maybe we are!
My message this week is twofold. Firstly, timing in marketing is an important thing. Targeting the right people at the right time with the right message about your brand and your offering is a key element. Too soon before a new product is launched, for example, and people forget. Too late and there’s not enough time to get your message across. Drag it on for too long and its effects can be negative. Secondly, let’s start the run in to Christmas later than October. I for one would love to hear nothing of Christmas until mid November. Let’s try not to warp time by attempting to stretch what is one day of the year into 8 weeks.
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Friday, July 17th, 2009
As improved technology and increased pressure enable and push us to speed up our work, David Ward this week ponders whether these faster turnaround times are always a good thing.
When I used to work at a well known bank, bouncing cheques and cancelling payments for those unlucky people frequently going beyond their credit allowance, a colleague and line manager of the team I worked in used to have what I suppose you could call a catchphrase. He would walk up behind an unsuspecting member of the team and utter the following words…
Faster, faster, faster… must go faster!
I never really understood whether or not this was his bizarre motivational technique gleaned from reading a book on people management or whether he really was just irritating. Who knows? Maybe it was both. His catchphrase sums up well a trend that I have noticed in my 10+ years in data processing and market research
Market research has always, as far as I can tell, been a fast-paced business. And this is very true for those working in data processing, especially as computing power and techniques in processing data improve. The time between questionnaire sign-off to CATI or e-survey setup seems to shrink, as does the time between fieldwork ending and the delivery of cross tabs. Everything has to be as thoroughly checked and accurate as before. It just needs to be delivered that little bit quicker. Over 10 years I think this is an undeniable trend.
Ever since I joined B2B International, I’ve looked at ways to improve the turnaround times in data processing that allow us to keep meeting our clients’ expectations. There are many ways of doing this. For example, we can invest in new software, as we have recently with Confirmit for our e-surveys and QPS Insight to allow us to carry out data entry more efficiently. We can also use the software we currently have more wisely, such as writing VBA scripts in Excel to automate certain tasks. Whatever the method we use to meet this challenge, it is a challenge I enjoy.
Having said that, I often ask myself whether there will come a point when people working in our industry will start to have to say no more often. Will the time come when the speed of delivery will start to have some detrimental effect on all-round quality of research carried out, and at what point does the trade-off between quality and speed become acceptable? At B2B International we’re well placed to deal with the challenges that market research throws at us. A combination of a strong team, smart thinking, and a constant drive to improve the way we work means we haven’t yet reached the point where “no” is something we have to say very often – and long may that continue!
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Friday, May 8th, 2009
David Ward this week uses his data processing expertise to show us how we can spot and weed out ‘rogue respondents’ to get the most reliable and valuable data from our online surveys.
The internet is a very useful tool in market research. We can reach a much wider and larger audience than using traditional pen and paper or CATI interviewing (spam filters allowing). We can make the interviewing experience more visual, route respondents to the questions relevant to them, view results in real time before the tabulation processes have begun, program logic checks in to the survey to catch errors before the analysis stage…the list of positives goes on. Of course there are, as with any interview method, pros and cons to choosing a particular method of interviewing.
On our travels on the internet we’re never too far away from someone wanting to collect our opinions about this and that. For example, when I was looking online for a new car recently, nearly every website I went to had some sort of pop-up window asking me to take part in a survey and, more often than not, some incentive was provided to entice me to spend my time completing the survey. Personally I’ve never been tempted to complete one of these surveys appearing in pop-up windows, but that’s just me. However, what is to stop someone seeing the incentive, thinking ‘I’d quite like a new iPod’, and just randomly clicking through the survey in double-quick time with no thought to their responses? For the respondent, the incentive is there to get the survey completed and have a chance of winning the prize, but not necessarily to give each question the thought required. There isn’t a lot we can do to stop this happening; however, there are things we can do after the data is collected to spot these rogue respondents.
The scope for logic checks on online surveys would be vast if you took it to the nth degree. We might lose a large number of respondents if we did do this though – through frustration at constantly having their responses questioned – but there is a balance to be found. As Head of Data Processing at B2B International, what steps can I take to ensure the quality of our data? There are no guarantees but we can take steps when setting up online surveys and reviewing the data to highlight suspect records. As I have said, we can program logic checks into our online surveys to make sure the survey is filled in correctly. We can make sure numbers add up to 100% where needed, or that respondents select the correct number of items from a list.
One of the easiest ways to catch potentially bad records in the data is to quickly check the time stamp for each interview. Did someone manage to complete a 20-minute interview in 5 minutes? This would suggest someone has just clicked through the survey with a click happy mouse finger, without giving due consideration to their answers.
Another telltale sign to look out for is something termed as “straightlining”. Has a respondent gone through a grid or battery of questions and given the same response each time?
We can also look for inconsistencies in the logic of the answers and for unlikely values in numeric questions. Part of this can be done during the survey and more checks can be run once the data have been collected.
We could also add in questions purely for verification purposes to allow us to judge whether or not the respondent is reading the question. For example, in a grid of questions we could add one that simply says “for verification purposes please answer strongly agree”. Along the same lines as this we could use data from any panels we have purchased to ask respondents to verify certain details. Comparisons can then be made between the original panel data and our own data collected online. Differences between the two could be viewed as suspect.
Finally, we can look at responses to open questions. We can check that fields do not contain random characters, or single character answers. If we find this, can we be sure we can trust the other answers given?
Failing one of these checks does not necessarily mean the data is not to be trusted but failing two or more may be grounds for removing that respondent. Perhaps the strongest guide to base the decision on is the time taken to complete a survey, but whichever method or combination of methods are used, having the checks in place gives us added confidence in the findings we present to our clients.
I’m not sure we will ever be able to completely stop respondents just clicking through an online survey giving responses that are illogical, poor quality and clearly not much use to market research, but knowing that there are telltale signs we can look out for which can indicate a respondent we may need to exclude is certainly reassuring.
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Friday, January 23rd, 2009
In his first Thursday Night Insight, David Ward – B2B International’s Head of Data Processing and resident number cruncher – warns us of the dangers of taking statistics at face value.
Numbers and statistics are quoted at us all the time but how often do we stop to think about what they really mean before we’re drawn in by them? Outside a farm shop a mile or so from where I live, I saw a sign which was advertising fresh milk for sale. This was no ordinary milk. In fact it was very special 96% fat free milk. For a split second I thought about it, was impressed, and then realised it was effectively ‘full fat’ milk. The way in which the information was presented made all the difference. The impact of the sign was as much about what it didn’t say as what it did.
The same can be said of the stores on the high street that are trying their hardest to get us to part with our money at the moment, and sales signs are in every store (or at least it seems that way). I’ve seen many signs offering up to 50% off, but what does this really mean?
Perhaps this is a little cynical but an alternative sales sign could read…
“Up to 50% off items in store, well to be honest most items have 15% off. It’s the 4 items that nobody wants and that we’ve been trying to sell for 6 months that have 50% off”.
Judging by a story in my local newspaper, it seems that some of the shoppers hoping to pick up a bargain at the closing Woolworths store left with thoughts not too dissimilar from my alternative sign. No one can deny that 50% off is a very tempting offer on the face of it, but my alternative sign may be more representative of the reality of what awaits the shopper.
There is a serious point here and it is that numbers can be made to say or infer almost anything you like. In market research, different messages can be shown depending on how the numbers are presented and indeed which numbers are presented. Even something as seemingly simple as indicating a typical respondent or trend isn’t as straight forward as is often assumed. Is it better to depict the “typical” respondent with the mean or median? How often are we told what the average person thinks without being told whether that figure has been taken from the mean or median?
Working in data processing, I spend a large proportion of my day working with numbers, whether it is column locations, frequency counts or checking that the figures in the tables are presented well. Not only do I put the effort into getting the raw data into table format, I spend equally as much effort in making sure those figures are correct. I want to be confident that this effort is not wasted and that the figures are being used in the most appropriate way.
Just like the sales signs I saw in the Woolworths shop windows, reading something into the figures that isn’t really there is all too easy.The ability to sift through the sea of information that a quantitative project can generate, be able to pick out what is relevant and interesting, and be able to apply the correct conclusions based on those numbers, is a real skill. It is an important skill in market research, and one that should not be underestimated.
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