Nfield Acceptable Use

Last updated on 17 August 2023

Why is there an Acceptable Use Policy for Nfield?

The Nfield platform creates and renders large and complex questionnaires that are coated with engaging, attractive and mobile-friendly designs, while revising quota targets and sample managements. All users only need internet, a username and a password to work with Nfield. NIPO takes care of all the IT management for all the users. 

All of this comes with lower costs and better scalability than ever before.

To keep the performance and availability bar so high, all the users of Nfield need to be awareof the rules that:

• maintain and even bolster Nfield’s powers for each user. 
• support the legal framework of the services provided by Nfield. We encourage you to read “Nfield Terms and Conditions“)

These rules are what this Acceptable Use Policy is about. 

If you are unsure if planned surveys on your domain could reach the limits of acceptable use defined in this document, please contact us well in advance – we can evaluate this for you, and help you find alternative solutions for your surveys if necessary. 

Please note:We continuously monitor the health of our services. To ensure uninterrupted services to all our customers, we may revoke operations of, and access to, domains that are in violation of the Acceptable Use Policy (Nfield Terms and Conditions article 4, sub 3).

Nfield is for market research surveys only

Nfield is a system for setting up and deploying market research surveys. Surveys are only to be market research surveys. You shall not use Nfield for any other purpose than conducting market research.

Broadcasting, advertising or selling under the guise of market research is not allowed.

We expect you to follow industry guidelines like ESOMAR, MRS and Insights Association when designing and executing your research projects. All these industry guidelines require you to have an opt-out option for the people you contact as part of your research. You must have such measures in place when you use Nfield to ensure that respondents can properly opt-out from either the current survey or all future surveys you conduct.

Please note that when sending emails through Nfield, we require you to include an opt-out option in the email. 

Security is important

NIPO spends a large part of its development effort in making sure your data is safe in Nfield.

Your data is yours and only you should have access. To make sure your data is safe, we train our developers in understanding security risks, we test against many security risks and we encrypt your data everywhere so it cannot be accessed by anyone other than you. Independent software security companies check that our security measures work and all our Nfield processes are audited as part of our ISO 27001:2013 (data security) certification.

But we need your help in keeping your data safe, as you are responsible for maintaining proper and safe access controls into you domain. Some simple rules help:

• Each user should have a personal login for Nfield. 
• Your users should renew their password regularly (you can let passwords expire automatically in Nfield).
• User passwords should be strong (select at least medium strength in Nfield Manager).
• Do not give users access for all eternity. Remember that your users can access Nfield from anywhere as long as they have valid credentials. You should regularly review and revoke access for users who no longer need to access Nfield (like ex-employees).

One domain per fieldwork entity / country

Data isolation, compliance, security and infrastructure management in Nfield all revolve around domains. A domain is an individual tenant in the multi-tenant Nfield platform. The Nfield setup and license model is based on the assumption that each company has its own domain. In cross-border organizations (regional/global) we also expect each commercial entity/country to have its own domain. 

You may run cross-border projects that are managed by one country/entity in one domain in Nfield, but when you are commercially managing different projects in different countries or from different entities we expect you to use a domain per country/entity. 

We understand working with multiple domains may bring some challenges around Single Sign-On (SSO) and deployment of Multi-Country-Projects. The NIPO team is happy to work with you on resolving those challenges, as we have done for many other cross-border organizations.

Download limits

Keep your data downloads reasonable.

• Do not download the same interview multiple times.
• Do not start multiple downloads at the same time.
• Do not download data from the same survey more than 4 times a day.

Domain limits

Nfield is offered as a shared service. To let everyone have the best experience we have put the following limits in place depending on your contract level:

You can deploy up to a certain maximum amount of concurrent started CAPI surveys and started Online surveys in a domain. This limit is set to help distribute the load from all customers over Nfield. If you ever need to deploy more concurrent projects in Nfield, please contact the NIPO team. To prevent going over the concurrent surveys limit, make sure you regularly stop fieldwork for projects that no longer require data collection.

You can use up to a certain maximum amount of storage for CAPI surveys and Online surveys in a domain. This limit is set to minimize the costs of overall storage and backup efforts. To prevent going over the storage limits, make sure you regularly remove surveys that no longer require data collection.

The size of a survey is calculated based on the following items:

• Questionnaire
• Uploaded media files (including media captured during the interview)
• All data collected for the survey

To check your current usage please navigate to the Management tab in the Nfield Manager.

On a bi-weekly basis You will be notified when reaching 80% of the limits. NIPO will once per month personally contact You if you reach 100% or more.

Survey limits

To prevent going over the concurrent surveys limit, make sure you regularly stop fieldwork for projects that no longer require data collection.

For online surveys the total survey activity in your domain should not exceed the following parameters without prior notification to NIPO:

^{* You should calculate per hour page hits based on actual load. So if you plan to conduct 1,000 10-page interviews in a 10 minute interval these count as 1,000 x 10 x 6 = 60,000 page hits, which exceeds the AUP levels.} 

If you plan to launch an online survey and expect to exceed one of these maxima, please contact NIPO at helpdesk@nipo.com at least 72 hours and/or at least 2 business days in advance. NIPO business days are Monday to Friday.

Optimize your questionnaire

Nfield allows you to create very complex questionnaires with almost every type of order possible, including repeats, conditional routing, piping, filtering, masking and many more. You create such powerful questionnaires using Nfield’s ODIN script language. But be aware, power comes with responsibility.

In Nfield you can create questionnaires that are so complex that they achieve the exact opposite of what you want. When designing your questionnaires please take the following into account so that they run fast in Nfield:

• When you use ODIN developer make sure your scripters are NIPO certified, so they understand the scripting language. 
• Always check the script in ODIN Developer and review the generated warnings. 
• Using overly complex combined filter statements (if this or this and this, but not if this or this and this) can significantly slow down rendering of questions in the interview. Our advice is to always check your filter statements for unnecessary complexity. 
• Do not create infinite loops (sounds logical but our support team always finds a few every year). 
• Limit the questionnaire size to 2,500 questions.
• Do not show more than 200 items on answer list / matrix statements as this slows down rendering of the question.

Using media files in your survey

Nfield allows you to use images, movies and sounds in your interview. You are only allowed to upload media files with a survey that are actually used in the survey. You are not permitted to use Nfield for distributing files outside the context of the survey. Make sure copyright and intellectual property rights are respected when uploading media files in Nfield.

When adding media files to your survey, make sure they are optimized for use in a web environment. All the media files you add to Nfield need to be downloaded to the CAPI app or streamed to your online respondents. That is why you always want these files to be as small as possible at the quality you require. 

During an interview you can also collect media files. These can be photos taken during the interview or sound recordings made. Please make sure you always collect such media files according to the guidelines set in the legislation of the geography you are collecting the data in. By default the image and sound quality in Nfield is set to low, but sometimes you need a higher quality. In that case you can define a higher quality in Nfield. Don’t increase the quality by default as it will require more bandwidth when interviewing / synchronizing.

Always test your questionnaire

To prevent any issues during the fieldwork phase, you should always test your questionnaire before starting fieldwork on your survey. If your project is a CAPI survey, you should test the survey on the intended interview devices to ensure proper behavior of the interview.

Fair use of quotas and incompletes interviews

Nfield allows you to build very large and complex quota frames. Like with any system there are some limitations on the size of quota frames we can handle without impacting interviewing performance. For Nfield these are: 2,500 quota cells across all levels combined.  

We understand that sometimes you need to ask a respondent some questions first to understand if a respondent is still suitable for the survey. We also understand that it is not always a great idea to ask these questions immediately into the interview. That is why Nfield does not require you to place screeners directly at the beginning of the questionnaire. However, what you are not allowed to do is to use quotas as a means of avoiding having to pay for an interview. That is why we are monitoring survey incidence and moment of screening out a respondent to identify potential misuse.  

You are not allowed to tamper with the status of completed interviews or force interviews to break of when successfully completed without marking them as such.  

Working with sample

In Nfield you can pre-load sample in both CAPI and Online. For each sample record you can specify variables that you fill before the survey starts and use during the interview. In Nfield you can specify up to 800 variables for each sample record. 

You can upload up to 100,000 respondents to your survey in Nfield. Technically you can upload more respondents, but this will negatively impact the performance of the Nfield Manager. If you need to upload more than 100,000 respondents to a survey, you should split them in separate surveys with no more than 100,000 respondents per survey. 

For Nfield Online you can maintain a blacklist. This is a list of respondents that have opted-out from participating in your surveys. Nfield allows you to list up to 1 million respondents in your blacklist. Please contact NIPO support at helpdesk@nipo.com when you have a requirement to exceed these limits.

Assigning interviewers

Nfield allows you to work with lots of surveys and lots of interviewers.

Nfield is however not designed to assign all surveys to all interviewers. Simply, because we think it this is never how you work in a real project. Assigning everything to everyone makes it harder for your interviewers to find a survey and it increases the amount of data they need to synchronize when they connect to the Nfield servers. It also has a negative impact on the Nfield synchronization services, as they now need to distribute much more work to interviewers.

To prevent such issues you should keep the amount of surveys that are assigned to one interviewer below 50.

Sending emails 

Nfield allows you to invite respondents to online surveys via email. You are only allowed to use this functionality to send emails in the context of survey announcements, invitations or reminders. 

We spend a lot of effort in Nfield in making sure the email ratings remain high so your mails are delivered to the respondent inbox rather than end up in their junk or spam box. We can only do so if all Nfield users play by a few basic, but important and simple rules:

• You will only use high quality sample from reliable sources to invite respondents to your surveys. Per batch Nfield accepts a maximum invalid address rate of 2%. This means that when you send out 10,000 emails no more than 200 may respond as invalid (5xx response).
• When sending emails you will confirm upfront that you email is properly formatted and will not trigger automated SPAM alerts. You can conduct such a check here: https://www.mail-tester.com. 
• You monitor the email SPAM ratings for your domain in the Nfield Manager. If you find that your email batches are causing bad ratings, we expect you to act to improve immediately. Per batch Nfield accepts a maximum abuse report rate of 0.01%. This means that when you send out 10,000 emails no more than 10 may be marked a spam or junk by the recipients.
• When using a custom email address you should make sure the SPF and DKIM records for the domain are properly configured. Nfield will help validate this for you. 
• Email batches should not be larger than 10,000. If you need to invite more respondents in one go, you should divide them in multiple batches. 
• If you work with low quality emails or bad sample, your account may be automatically moved to a lower quality email sender group, with a lower email delivery rate, until your ratings approve. 

Using appointments 

Nfield allows you to make appointments during CAPI interviews. This is meant to allow interviewers to resume an interview at a later time. The appointment functionality is not meant to interview multiple respondents or to conduct several waves of a study with the same respondent. Doing so may be considered as an attempt to avoid payment for the interview. 

Using themes to restyle or reformat questions

Themes in Nfield can be very powerful. You can use themes to change the look and feel of a questionnaire or to create new types of questions. Like with the ODIN questionnaire, power comes with responsibility. If not applied correctly custom JavaScript in themes can break the proper flow of an interview. Therefore you should always test the combination questionnaire theme on the intended interview device (browser / CAPI app). When making changes in themes be aware of differences in browser interpretation. Always test with multiple devices and multiple browsers when working with custom themes.

Nfield allows you to create as many themes as you need, but be aware that we do not filter which themes get sent to your CAPI interviewers. CAPI apps always synchronize all themes you have created on your domain, even those you have created for online surveys. To prevent synch sessions from becoming unnecessary slow, please remove themes which you will no longer use from your domain.

Efficient use of system resources

Auto-refresh on Nfield Manager pages must be limited to once per minute. 

When setting up (recurring) tasks in the API, please make sure they are executed with a reasonable frequency and size and are disabled when no longer needed. Also aim to spread load over time to prevent putting unnecessary stress on Nfield. When you for example have an automatic data download job that retrieves data for 200 surveys every day, don’t trigger all downloads at once, but try to spread them over the day.

Penetration testing or load testing is not permitted on any of the Nfield services.

Support

If you have any questions or concerns regarding our Acceptable Use Policy and the projects in your domain, feel free to contact NIPO Support at helpdesk@nipo.com. To help us expedite a swift and helpful response, please provide as much information as you can concerning you query – we are glad to help out.  

Overview of key acceptable usage limits for Nfield

* Depending on the subscription level.