It’s natural for researchers, fieldwork managers, sample managers and sample providers to want the highest possible completion rate for every online survey. And while a certain amount of dropouts are to be expected, alarm bells can start ringing when the percentage appears to be too high.

If there’s no obvious explanation, such as the survey being very time-consuming or poorly presented, the reason may be a technical one. Having investigated a number of reported survey dropout cases at NIPO, we have identified five likely technical causes, along with ways to mitigate them:

1. Bots hitting on ‘anonymous link’ surveys.
2. Bots hitting on survey links which contain Respondent Keys, when surveys aren’t ‘anonymous’.
3. Email Service Providers checking links in email invites.
4. A problem with API automation calls from Nfield Online interviewing.
5. An issue in Nfield.

If you’re concerned about overly high dropouts in any of your surveys, it could be worth looking into these possible causes.

1. Bots hitting on ‘anonymous link’ studies

When an ‘anonymous link’ to a survey is shared on a social network, allowing anyone who finds it to enter the survey, you can expect bots to pick up on it and ‘give it a try’. We have observed a number of surveys with literally millions of interview starts that can be attributed to bots, rather than human respondents.

These starts can be recognized in your survey data, as there will be no answers to any of the survey questions. You may still see automatically generated ‘respondent data’, such as device detection, which has been run before the first question is shown. But no data other than that.

How to prevent it
Add a simple landing page between the link and the actual interview start. All it needs to have on it is some text that introduces the survey and asks for confirmation to continue, with a button that brings the respondent into the actual interview.

When tested on previously mentioned cases with the millions of dropouts, which were suspected as being caused by bots starting the interviews, this simple trick lowered the dropout rate from over 99.9% to below 10%. From this, we concluded that (most of the) bots that were causing the high dropout rates do not follow up (by ‘clicking the button’) after the initial request.

It’s understandable that you may feel hesitant about adding ‘yet another screen’ to the survey. But if it already has an introduction page, on which the respondent is only required to click a button, why not simply move this page up the order, as described above?

Why ‘non-legitimate’ interview starts matter

• a. Interview starts are relatively expensive, as opening the first question page initiates all the processes and creates all the artefacts needed for the survey.
• b. These false interview starts mess up your survey metrics, as you won’t be able to see how many genuine dropouts you had, and therefore cannot get an idea of your survey’s quality.

Of course, there are also bots which are smart enough to follow up on some questions and provide pseudo answers. When that is the case, the simple landing page solution will not work.

2. Bots hitting on survey links which contain Respondent Keys, when surveys aren’t ‘anonymous’

Even if you don’t share your survey link via a social network, but invite all your respondents personally, providing each with a link containing a unique Respondent Key, bots can still find these and ‘give it a try’. Some smart bots even make up Respondent Keys that they then try.

How to prevent it
As in example #1 (Bots hitting on ‘anonymous link’ studies), a landing page can help. But if the bot is somewhat smart, this alone may not resolve the issue.

If you observe your survey being ‘polluted’ with Respondent Keys you did not hand out, you may want to set the ‘Allow only known respondents’ setting to True. With this option set, Nfield will only allow respondents with Respondent Keys that have been uploaded into the survey sample table.

3. Email Service Providers checking links in invites

If you share personalized links (containing unique Respondent Keys) via email to specific respondents, dropouts can also be caused by the respondents’ email service providers checking that link as part of their automated security process. It is common for email service providers to follow links in emails sent to their customers to check they don’t trigger malicious action. We know, for example, that Google, Hotmail and Yahoo do this to protect their users.

Following these links often means opening them, which causes the interview to be started. The email service provider will conclude that the link is safe, but until the email recipient (i.e. the actual respondent) also clicks that link, the survey will be considered by Nfield as a dropout, because the survey was started but not finished.

How to tell if this is the cause of your dropouts
Take a look at the times these unfinished interviews were started. If you see many dropouts at around the time, or shortly after, you sent out your email invites, this is a good indication.

4. Problems with API automation calls from Nfield interviewing

Before respondents are even shown their first question, many Online surveys begin by automatically running processes to establish the respondent’s device and browser (to determine how the questions should be rendered) and to verify the link that started the interview has not been tampered with.

These processes often involve Nfield interviewing making API calls to services which are external to Nfield. These API calls are not always performed as well as they should be, especially when the load is high. When an API request takes too long to be serviced, Nfield can give up on the request and time out. Without getting the response necessary for the interview to start, the respondent also gives up and closes the browser.

Sometimes these API requests just fail. If no appropriate measures have been taken in the questionnaire script to deal with a failing request, the script can run into an error. When the respondent sees this, they drop out.

5. An issue in Nfield

A less frequent cause of high dropout rates can be an issue in Nfield itself.
NIPO mitigates issues once these have been reported or recognized. Depending on the severity, hotfixes can be put in place.

What to do when your Nfield Online survey has unexpected high dropout

Consider each of the first four possible causes described above, and see if you observe anything that indicates any of them as the likely cause. Then take the suggested action.

If, after doing this, you still think what you see is the result of a bug in Nfield, create a support ticket. Share as much detail as possible.

As Market Research requirements continue to evolve, we’ve recognized a need for sampling points which also incorporate addresses.

Quota sampling and address-based sampling are commonplace. Up till now, it has been a choice of one or the other. However, it would be beneficial to combine the two, for both practical and financial reasons.

Follow up: We’ve often heard about market researchers who’ve needed to follow up on incomplete visits (e.g. busy respondent) to complete a sample quota.

Avoid over-shoot: In address-based sampling, fieldwork projects can be made more cost-efficient by stopping interviewing when enough addresses have been completed.

When do you need to combine quota and address sampling?

You should choose to set up this survey type in Nfield if your project has the following characteristics

• 1. It has a quota specification.
  AND
• 2a. It includes a requirement to interview at specific addresses.
  OR
• 2b. Incomplete interviews must be followed up.

How-to

Setting up a combined quota-address survey in Nfield is similar to setting them up separately. 

Before you start, we recommend watching NIPO Academy 37 to learn how to set up a CAPI survey with sampling point with/without quota. You can also refer to our blog post Embedding Sampling Points in Quota Target surveys for deeper and more balanced insights. Then, you just need to add the addresses.

Setting up this survey type is easy.

If you have any questions or comments about setting up and using CAPI surveys with Sampling Points with addresses and quotas in Nfield Manager, please do not hesitate to contact us.

Market researchers examining in-store shopping behavior are increasingly asking us for virtual shelf functionality.

Traditionally, researching this subject has been done by setting up physical displays and inviting shoppers to the relevant locations. However, this is an expensive exercise. And since the coronavirus pandemic, online methods for capturing shopping behavior have become very popular.

In response to this rising demand, we have been working with ConceptSauce to understand their solutions and develop a means of incorporating virtual shelf research in Nfield.

Discover virtual shelves

ConceptSauce can provide a virtual shelf or virtual store for market research, which enables shoppers’ actions to be monitored and timed. Virtual shelves can easily be adjusted to carry out A/B testing with altered prices, added promotional banners, changed packaging or different product positioning. You can also find out what happens when you send shoppers on a mission to find a particular product.

When it comes to building your own shelves, ConceptSauce can do this for you, or you can do it yourself using their shelf builder.

Gaining insights through Nfield

Letting respondents loose on your virtual shelves is just the start.

Integrating Virtual Shelf in Nfield opens up a host of survey possibilities. Once the virtual shopping has been done, you can retrieve the lists of both the purchased items and the ones which were looked at but not chosen. Your Nfield questionnaire can ask why these decisions were made. In the case of sending shoppers to find specific products, you can see where they looked and how long it took.

How to integrate Virtual Shelf in Nfield

The following high-level steps outline what needs to be done to integrate Virtual Shelf in Nfield. You can, of course, get your technical teams to explain!

1. Contact ConceptSauce for a demo, then set up your shelves.
2. Refer to Academy #30 – Pause and resume surveys in Nfield Online to incorporate your survey transitions with ConceptSauce.
3. Refer to Nfield External API to retrieve respondents’ shopping behavior. You’ll need to build a custom web page as an intermediary for using the ConceptSauce API and re-arrange the output to align with Nfield formatting.

Of course, you are very welcome to contact our helpdesk / salespeople for more information. Also, please feel free to share examples with us of how you’ve made this work.

In an online survey world that’s reliant on text responses, do you ever wonder how much you might be missing? Especially for questions which invite free-form answers. When you have respondents who struggle with typing, or articulating thoughts via written words, or for whom the survey is not in their first language.

To solve this, we need to think beyond text. We need to see what other possibilities are out there. We need to be inspired by behavioral changes, such as the increasing popularity of using WhatsApp for voice messaging instead of text messaging.

Voice messaging benefits both sender and recipient by allowing more information to be communicated, in less time, without the effort of pre-organizing thoughts. It also facilitates an extra layer of expression through tone-of-voice. And it’s a convenient solution for young and old alike.

Audio recorded survey answers

Enabling audio answers in online surveys can therefore open up a whole new world of quality research, from a wider range of respondents. Respondents will share more information, including their emotions, and explain themselves better.

But how do you handle voice responses, to extract all the information they contain? Do you need extra resources, people and coding? Yes and no. There are already solutions which can intelligently transcript audio recordings into text and analyze tones-of-voice to identify emotions. However, humans will probably still be needed to ensure proper understanding of more in-depth messages.

Video recorded survey answers

To take your market research on respondents’ emotions to the next level, you can even consider video answers. Have you ever thought about how much information is revealed by a person’s facial expression?

According to research¹ published in 2020, there are 16 universal facial expressions². Imagine what you could learn about how a respondent instinctively feels, if you could capture their facial expression when they see an advertisement, poster, news story or new product.

Or what about their behavior when encountering new packaging design, how they use your hand soap or how they pour your drinks? Having these moments recorded can provide much more information than asking for conscious descriptions.

Worried about the overhead? You needn’t be. Professional emotion recognition software is able to analyze and interpret captured expressions.

How to integrate audio and video responses in online surveys

To find out how to integrate audio and video recordings in Nfield Online surveys, see our post about to set this up this with Pipe.  Also check out Phebi AI for voice emotion analysis.

^{1 Sixteen facial expressions occur in similar contexts worldwide
2 How to Read Facial Expressions}

Security is one of NIPO’s top priorities, with both security and compliance positioned at the heart of our organization, and our Nfield platform. As such, we ensure these topics are always addressed in the foundations of our work, during the design stage. Never as a last-minute concern. And we have been doing it like this since we started developing Nfield back in 2011.

This means NIPO employees are constantly considering security. A fact which is reflected in our ISO 27001:2013 certification, for both our security management and the security controls we give our customers.

But we don’t stop there.

When Microsoft provided the opportunity for developers to become certified as Azure Security Engineers, we encouraged our team members to attain this status. This requires an individual developer to study and practice hard, before taking a challenging exam. In April 2022, another of our colleagues passed the Azure Security Engineer (AZ-500) exam, bringing our total number of developers with this highly desirable status to five.

We’re really proud of this latest achievement and wish to thank the individual concerned, along with all our Azure Security Engineers, for their support and ongoing commitment to security.

If you want to know more about how your data is secure with Nfield, see our article on this topic.

If you’d like to incorporate audio and video responses within Nfield surveys, you can do this by integrating Pipe’s recording platform. Below is an example of how this feature might be useful.

Before you start

Incorporating Pipe into Nfield surveys requires specific technical expertise. You’ll need someone who is

• Experienced in JavaScript & CSS
• Experienced in using Nfield themes and familiar with its documentation.

Gather your resources

• Pipe website
• Pipe Documentation
• Nfield Chicago Documentation
• Academy #6 NfieldChicago theming
• Pipe script example
• Pipe theme example

Setting up Pipe

1. Choose a suitable price plan.
2. Sign up and sign in to Pipe.
3. In the main screen, set up your recorder (see below)

Note: You should set the display size according to the device your respondents will use. It is also possible to make the sizing responsive to a range of device screens. Please refer to Pipe’s own instructions for this.

4. Click [Generate Embed Code].
5. Go to the “Add it to your website” box (see below) and find the JavaScript code in the 2.0 JS tab.

6. Save the values shown for AccountHash and EID (found at the bottom of the “Add it to your website” box). These will be needed later.
7. By default, audio recording in mobile devices requires a recorder app which respondents may not have. To change to inline recorder,

• go to the settings icon next to the Production dropdown box.

• tick the following boxes to use the inline recorder.

• Now click [Save environment] button at the bottom of the page to save the settings.

Script setup

Here is an example of ODIN script that will show an audio recorder and a video recorder. You can also download the script here. See beneath for explanations.

1. Adds the theme name.
2. Sets a font that is a bit hidden to hide the payload setting
3. If working on a specified-respondents survey, each original respondent key is used for mapping the recordings.  
4. If working on an anonymous survey, this generates a random number which is saved as SecondRespondentKey in the sample table and used to map the recordings.

Note: The higher the random number, the lower the chance of the duplicate SecondRespondentKey being made. You should therefore check this or decide which recordings to pick in the data processing part.

5. The theme recognizes “addpipe=true” in UIOPTIONS as an instruction to insert an audio recorder.
6. The hidden font is now used to hide the text in that line. And it uses [payload=(respondentkey)q(question number)] to pass this information form the script to the recorder.
7. The theme recognizes “Addpipev=true” in UIOPTIONS as an instruction to insert a video recorder.
8. Completion of the survey question is acknowledged.

Note: Once each recording is uploaded to Pipe, you might want to add *BACK to prevent re-recording or do a check on re-recordings (spotted by same payload).

Theme setup

1. Open nfield.theme.js with a text editor e.g. Notepad++.
2. Find the following identifiers in nfield.theme.js. The first instance is for the audio recorder and the second instance is for the video recorder.
   
   accountHash:" YourAccountHash", eid:"YourEID"

3. Replace YourAccountHash and YourEID with the JavaScript values previously generated in Pipe. (See step 5 in Setting up Pipe.)
4. Update other parameters according to values generated by your JavaScript.
5. Zip it and upload to Nfield Manager in the usual way.

Check recording functionality

1. Click the link to your survey.
2. As soon as you land on a recording page, your browser will ask for permissions to use your microphone and/or camera as relevant. Click “Allow”.

3. Test running the surveys and make some recordings.
4. Go to Pipe, where these should appear in the recording tab, and check the payload value.

Storage setup

1. Go to the settings icon next to the Production dropdown box.
2. Check its Region settings.

Note: These recordings will be out of scope of Nfield. You should therefore be aware of the location where the data is stored, along with any different security and compliance levels.

3. Go to the Storage tab and select Your storage.
4. Consider the options for storing in an alternative environment to that provided by Pipe.

Mapping Payload to Filename

It would be too labor intensive to click every individual record to find the payload information (respondent key and question id) to rename its recording file. But you can automate this task by using a webhook to send the payload and file name to trigger file renaming (optimally in batches). Please refer to the Pipe Webhook documentation for how to use their webhook. Alternatively, you can program something yourself or use other codeless automation tools, such as Microsoft Power Automate, to do the work.

We hope you find these instructions useful. Please feel free to share your feedback with us.

Attractive, easy-to-digest presentation plays an important role in encouraging survey response. Nfield automatically wraps surveys in a professional design that’s consistent with our industry’s highest standards. Most of the time, this provides everything our users need. However, there can be occasions when you want to customize your presentation more extensively.  

Experienced scripters with knowledges of common web development techniques (Javascript and CSS) can add extra presentation elements by incorporating their own theme packages (via a zip file).  

Easier customization using Markdown language 

Markdown is a lightweight markup language that can be used to add formatting elements to plaintext documents.¹ It is very popular, especially among developers, and is widely used by our own teams and in Nfield documentation.  

We’ve added a new pre-packaged theme (markdown.zip) to the theme example section in NfieldChicago documentation for you to use. This includes a third-party library as a Markdown parser, which provides you with additional options for formatting your text using basic Markdown syntax.  

Here’s how it works. 

Examples

1. Header 

Adding headers improves respondents’ experience, by clarifying where they are in the survey.

These are created by simply using # for header 1) and ## for header 2) …etc.

2. Link

Links are sometimes useful for enabling respondents to reference relevant information, which helps them understand context and increase their trust.  

A clickable link that opens in a new tab is created by using [text](url) "optional hover-over text".

3. Simplified font variation

There is no need to define bold, italic and bold and italic for every different font.  

In Markdown language, this is achieved simply by using _italic text_, __bold text__ and ___bold italic text___. This results in much simpler, easier to read scripts.

4. Horizontal rule

If you want to add supplemental information to help respondents answer specific questions, enclosing this between two horizonal lines makes for a good, clear presentation.  

A line can be created in Markdown by using ---.

5. Emojis² 

Millennials are more likely to engage in surveys that are presented in a more visual and gamified way. Emojis³ are also a good tool in this regard.  

You can now copy and paste emojis to your script. See a list of emojis in Unicode 1.1.  

6. Email address

It is usual to provide a means of contact either at the beginning or the end of a questionnaire.  

You can now easily incorporate a clickable link by enclosing your email address as shown here <sales@nipo.com>. This will launch the users email program / app.

How to incorporate an advanced text formatting theme in Nfield  

Instructions for doing this begin at step 7 of 10 Steps to create a theme. If this will be your first time incorporating a theme in Nfield, we recommend watching Academy #6 NfieldChicago theming.  

The world of Markdown is quite extensive, with possibilities ranging from standard headers to more advanced options. Please look at theming in NfieldChicago documentation to download and try this out.  We also have another example theme available for setting font colors called markup.zip (See bottom right for download link). Please feel free to share any feedback or questions you have about themes with us.  

^{1 Getting Started | Markdown Guide
2 Emoji is part of the extended Markdown syntax that is not included in the markdown.zip theme which supports only basic syntax. It is supported as the fact that it is in Unicode.
3 Using emojis in mobile web surveys for Millennials? A study in Spain and Mexico} 

NIPO is proud to announce the opening of our new Mumbai office. In recent years we have seen a strong growth of our business in the Asia Pacific region, something that also was the result of our Nfield China deployment we launched 2 years ago. This major step is now followed by the opening of our new office in Mumbai, that has been in business as of 1 November 2021.

The NIPO Mumbai office will be dedicated to supporting our customers in the Asia Pacific region, with backup from the NIPO Helpdesk in Amsterdam. 

NIPO offers remote support to all Nfield users by email (no telephone at the moment, due to all staff working at home for reasons related to Covid), hosts Nfield introduction sessions and on-site training sessions on topics ranging from survey creation to fieldwork management.

We are delighted to announce the opening of this new office and look forward to supporting you from Mumbai!

As anyone who shares a broadband network with high-capacity users knows, when others are eating away at bandwidth by playing high-definition games, streaming TV shows or live broadcasting over social media, internet performance deteriorates.

The same is true for any shared IT resource. Including Nfield’s survey hosting environment in the Azure cloud. Our acceptable use policy is designed to prevent excessive resource use by some causing performance problems for all. But with the roll-out of our Isolated Interview feature, we aim to completely eliminate the risk of suffering from “noisy neighbors”!

The Noisy Neighbor effect

In a shared hosting environment, an individual survey occupying a disproportionally large amount of processing power will lessen everyone else’s performance. This can happen if a lot of respondents suddenly rush to a survey at the same time, or if a badly scripted questionnaire results in an infinite loop or excessive quota checks.

To prevent this in situations where it can be foreseen, such as the planned launch of a large-scale research project, we ask customers to warn us in advance so we can scale-up capacity as necessary. But errors, such as bad scripts, can overload the system without warning.

Nfield does automatically expand its capability as necessary, but this isn’t instantaneous. In the period before scaling up takes place, online interviewing performance and Nfield manager responsiveness slow down. Respondents can get frustrated and the market research team’s job becomes more difficult, as everyone suffers the consequences of having “noisy neighbors”.

Proactive protection and appropriate scale-up

Thanks to new technology, we have succeeded in developing an architecture whereby each individual survey is run in isolation (survey-level isolation), utilizing its own resources and with the ability to expand these without affecting other surveys.

When an isolated survey reaches its pre-set Nfield threshold, its resources will automatically scale up, without other surveys in the same or different domains being impacted during the moments of heavy loading or scaling. In Nfield design, if a request faces timeout, there is a double fall-back mechanism to keep servicing the request. Initially falling back to the isolated resource, then to the shared resource.

Expanding in this way at survey level is also more economic than doing so at deployment level (as in the noisy neighbor scenario).

By keeping every survey accountable within its own realm, Isolated Interviewing

• eliminates noisy neighbor effect
• scales more economically

A record-breaking case

Isolated Interviewing doesn’t just provide protection from noisy neighbors. It also enables heavy users to scale up faster and cheaper than when in a shared environment. A shining example is a recent project in which 2.36 million requests were handled in a four-day period, peaking at 5,000 requests per minute. This also saw us smash right through the 100,000 successfully completed Nfield interviews in 24 hours barrier for the first time!

Despite this extremely heavy load, processing time remained reasonably fast, with 99% of requests processed within 549ms, and no other customers impacted. In addition to performance speed, the Isolated Interviewing feature provides a more stable, risk-free environment for everyone.

Global roll-out

All domains within our America deployment environment already have Isolated Interviewing enabled. However, Isolated Interviewing only comes into effect in newly-created surveys. Existing surveys remain on shared resources.

Over time, we’ll be carefully rolling Isolated Interviewing out to more domains in other deployment environments. And, of course, we’ll continue to invest in this feature to further increase its capabilities to accommodate our customers’ hunger for high-volume projects.

Nfield’s Voice Over feature is a very useful tool for both Online and CAPI surveys, which can be used to overcome visual impairments (Online), interviewer bias (CAPI) and local dialect differences (CAPI and Online).

By voicing survey questions and the various response options, Voice Over broadens the scope of people who can contribute to answering surveys.

In particular, it provides the following benefits:

• Enables respondents with reading difficulties, due to blindness, part-sightedness, dyslexia and other cognitive and learning disabilities, to participate. These people usually already have voice-over-text programs to assist them in using the internet. However, some of these programs are not compatible with Nfield Online surveys, so it is far better to have Voice Over functionality embedded in the survey itself.

• Reading out questionnaires in the appropriate local dialect. This is especially handy in countries where there are multiple dialects. CAPI interviewers can still perform their work, even when deployed in a region where they don’t speak the local dialect. Online respondents can play audio in their own dialect, even if the written language is in another.

• Ensures CAPI interviewers don’t (consciously or subconsciously) influence responses through the way they read out questions and answer options.

Enhanced functionality

Nfield has recently enhanced its Voice Over functionality by making it possible to play audio for questions and answers separately. So users can repeat-play specific answers for clarification, without having to listen to the entire question with all its answers over again.

How Voice Over works

Go to the page produced by our NfieldChicago team for a simple demonstration of Voice Over in action and instructions for implementation. You’ll also find this in the NIPO Academy video #19.

Setting up Voice Over isn’t difficult. It simply needs some patience for the time taken to link each separate audio file with each part of the question.

Implementation tips

• To save time making audio clips, use a downloadable mp3 text-to-speech conversion tool.
• Use the same gender voice for different languages within the same survey to avoid responses being influenced by gender bias.
• Ensure audio clip file sizes are as small as possible, with a 128 kbps bitrate, for fast loading speed.

If there’s anything else you’d like to know about using Nfield’s Voice Over feature, don’t hesitate to contact us!

Having achieved gold status for the Application Integration competency for the Microsoft Partner Network at the end of last year, we are proud to share the news of NIPO’s success in achieving an additional Silver status for the much desired Security competency.

The competencies Microsoft awards are a strong confirmation that these partners have demonstrated the highest, most consistent capability and commitment to the adoption and implementation of the latest Microsoft technology. Securing a competency is highly dependent on successful certification of technical staff, which implies a deep and continuous investment from both the organization and the individual software developers.

Our Nfield users can benefit directly from NIPOs status within the Microsoft Partner Network. Next to our annual ISO 27001-2013 (Information Security) certification, this is another proof of leading external recognition for the NIPO team and our Nfield platform. This information can be used in client pitches for those projects where Nfield, as Kantar’s destination platform, is used and where the customer would like to understand how, for example, security is addressed.

Securing the Silver status for the Security competency was one of our goals for 2021. Now the NIPO team will continue her efforts to upgrade the Security competency to Gold status.

More and more customers have been asking for real-time insights while a survey is still in progress. And now, Nfield is able to deliver these via our new Data Repository feature, which provides a continuous data delivery pipeline straight into your dashboard.

The need for speed

Today’s fast-paced world calls for ever-faster reporting. Nfield Online’s powerful interviewing capability enables a tremendous amount of data to be collected in a short time-frame, without hardware or network limitations. For many customers, the ability to quickly capitalize on this data is also very important.

A good example could be in media production, where survey data can be used to inform outlets of current audience interests. Let’s say, skateboarding suddenly becomes a hot topic at the Olympic Games. The content producer can choose to use this information to switch focus and retain audience attention.

With the Nfield Data Repository feature, insights can be attained immediately, without expensive setup and dependency on IT teams.

Transition from traditional data processing to Continuous Data Pipeline

Transferring Nfield interview data into insights in customers’ own dashboards is a complex task. Traditionally, the ETL (extract, transform and load) process requires involvement from data processing and IT teams, either during initial setup or each time the process is run, which is a time-consuming overhead.

Now, with the Nfield Data Repository, data from completed interviews is extracted every 10 minutes and directly fed into an engine which converts it into a database format, from where your dashboard / reporting tool can instantly retrieve it.

Get started with scalable pricing

To make the fast, high-performance engine that keeps the data pipeline flowing affordable to all customers, we offer a scalable pricing system based on usage.

You’ll find the new “REPOSITORIES” section toggled within the Nfield Manager interface. To enable it, please contact your Nfield account manager.

The Nfield CAPI app, used by interviewers to conduct surveys, has recently undergone an extensive makeover to make it more intuitive and, with that, faster to work with. This has resulted in a new version (2.11) which users are now invited to switch to.

To switch to version 2.11, go to the diagnostics tab in the Nfield CAPI app’s settings. For now, these settings allow you to switch between the old and new versions as you prefer. Over time, the old version will be phased out.

What’s changed

Instantly identified by its teal coloring (instead of blue), the new version Nfield CAPI app has been completely redesigned in terms of navigation and how the various screens look and work. From the very start, you’ll see how all the high-level information is shown together on one screen, with the ability to expand any section in one tap. Users thereby have instant access to latest status details without going to a different screen, so can quickly switch between various functional elements.

This simplified navigation provides the shortest path to starting an interview. Throughout the course of a day’s work, interviewers spend less time navigating around the app and enjoy faster access to what they need to know and do. With fewer distractions, work is easier to focus on.

The thinking behind the update

The person behind our new version Nfield CAPI app is our UX (user experience) designer, Deniz. Having worked at NIPO for more than 12 years, including time on our helpdesk, Deniz has a deep understanding of what Nfield CAPI users need. In his UX work, he uses various tools and techniques to generate insights into user behaviors. Putting these two things together, combined with the fact that user interaction technology has evolved a long way since Nfield was first launched in 2013, Deniz realized it was high time to give the Nfield CAPI app a major overhaul. The result is our customers and their interviewers all get to benefit from a more streamlined way of working.

Standardized familiarity

The Nfield CAPI app’s new look is based on the Material (https://material.io/) interface guideline that standardizes how elements in a screen should be designed for intuitive interaction. This determines the look and behavior of navigation bars and how cards are used.

Following standardized principles is advantageous because users more quickly feel comfortable with using an app that’s new to them, due to already being familiar with the process via other apps. In psychology, this is known as the Mere-Exposure Effect. So we have a very solid reasoning for adopting design standardization!

Below are the components used in building the new Nfield CAPI app. All of which should be familiar to everyone used to using apps.

No time to waste

Market research interviewers often only work part-time or for short-term periods. The ability to quickly get up-to-speed on how to do the job is very important. Preconditioned familiarity for how to use their tools, in this case the Nfield CAPI app, is therefore very valuable. We believe it only takes two or three uses of the new Nfield CAPI app to feel fully comfortable with it. And, of course, because the new navigation is more streamlined, work can be done more quickly too.

What do you think?

The new version Nfield CAPI app is all about making interviewers’ work easier and faster. Deniz will continue to update it as necessary to improve the user experience even more. The more feedback he gets from you, the better he can make it!

We therefore invite you to tell us what you think about the new version Nfield CAPI app. What do you like about it and what do you feel should be done differently? What new functionality would you like to have?

Contact us at info@nipo.com.

Nfield surpassed a significant milestone on 20 May 2021, smashing through the 100K completed interviews per 24 hours barrier. More importantly, the Nfield platform handled the 104,758 successful completes without showing the slightest level of stress.

The record completion rate was comprised of 86,949 Online surveys and 17,809 CAPI surveys. Of these, 49K were performed on the APAC server, an incredibly high figure which was driven by a single survey in Japan which produced 37,226 completes.

Assisted by isolation

This Japanese survey is, itself, significant for the fact that it ran as an isolated survey using dedicated Azure resources (containers). Using this solution means that the load it generated did not have any impact on other domains and/or surveys. The ability to run isolated interviewing is facilitated via Nfield’s Function app, which has been made possible following intensive collaboration between our team and Microsoft architects. The Function app itself was hit more than 2 million times in 24 hours in relation to this Japanese survey.

But not an isolated event

Having confirmed Nfield’s ability to comfortably handle this level of traffic, we are looking forward to it becoming a daily norm. It’s good to know that isolation can be a very positive thing! 😊

Sampling Points enable researchers to obtain quota-proportioned responses across all individual settings within a CAPI survey. They can be embedded in Quota Target surveys to ensure consistent representation within every different location. As well as providing overall balance, the use of Sampling Points means fieldwork progress can be examined on a setting-by-setting basis.

How Sampling Points work

Sampling Points are the various locations where interviews are carried out within a CAPI survey. They might be exhibition halls, shopping malls, districts, cities, cinemas, hospitals, places of worship, etc. When Sampling Points are applied within a survey, every fieldwork location must be designated as or to a Sampling Point. There cannot be any non-designated interview locations.

Because different sampling points might be different sizes, with access to more or fewer respondents, each one requires its own Quota Target.

For example, a CAPI survey examining behavior of hotel guests would involve face-to-face interviews in variously-sized hotels. To ensure respondents from each key gender and age group segment are proportionately represented at each individual location, the Quota Targets are adjusted according to hotel size. The smaller the hotel, the smaller the quota targets, and vice versa. But the ratios per segment always stay the same. Larger hotels may thereby also call for more interviewers to be assigned.

Sampling Points in the Nfield Manager

Sampling Points are easy and intuitive to set up in the Nfield Manager. If you already have any CAPI Sampling Point with Quota surveys in CAPI Manager, you can easily migrate these to the Nfield manager for an improved experience, with just one click.

Sampling Points can be set up in the Nfield Manager either by manual entry or by uploading an excel sheet (complete with Quota Targets). These can also easily be individually updated as necessary.

Note that you have to calculate and enter the different Quota Targets for each Sampling Point. Nfield doesn’t have a facility for automatically adjusting these.

Sampling Points set up process in Nfield Manager

If you have any questions or comments about setting up and using CAPI surveys with Sampling Points in the Nfield Manager, please do not hesitate to contact us.