Among the many decisions you have to take as a market research professional, choosing whether to distribute each online survey via a generic or unique links is more important than it might at first seem. However, armed with the right guidance, you should be able to identify the best option in each case, without too much difficulty.

Here are the benefits, drawbacks and reasons to choose each option, together with how to generate these links in Nfield.

Unique survey links

Unique survey links are when every invited respondent is assigned their own personalized URL to access the survey. The overarching benefit of using unique links is that you can track individual responses and identify which participants have completed the survey. Because unique links can only be used once, they also reduce the chance of your survey being infiltrated by robots.

Situations where unique links are the best choice include:

1. When you need to track individual responses and identify which participants have completed the survey. This is particularly useful when you are offering incentives for completion.

2. When you need to ensure data quality. Because unique links can only be used once, they prevent participants from responding multiple times and/or sharing them with multiple other people. So your results are not skewed by duplicated responses and you maintain better control over who’s contributing to your data.
   
   You can tighten this up further in Nfield by turning on the “allow only known respondent” option when setting up your unique link survey. (See image under “How to generate unique survey links in Nfield”, below.)

3. When you need or want to personalize the survey experience by using the participant’s name or other personal details within it to create a more engaging experience that increases response rates.

How to generate unique survey links in Nfield

You will need to include individual respondent keys as part of your sample upload, then add these keys to the end of your generic survey URL – so genericURL/[respondentkey] – to create all the unique links. Alternatively, you can get Nfield to automatically generate the links when sending out the email invitations. When you have an integration between Nfield Online and an external source, such as a panel provider, your panel provider can easily arrange it in the panel system. This ensures each participant receives a unique link that can only be used once.

The “Allow only known respondents” option.

Generic survey link

A generic survey link is when all potential respondents receive the same link to enter the survey, regardless of their identity or demographic. The overarching benefit of using a generic link is that it’s quick and easy to distribute to a large number of people, because you can simply share the same link via emails, social media, or any other channel you want to use.

A couple of pointers for when to opt for a generic link:

1. A generic link should only be used when you don’t need to track individual responses nor identify which individual participants have completed the survey.

2. A generic link is the best option when you want to maintain participant anonymity.

However, it’s worth noting that online surveys can sometimes suffer from high dropout rates, which can impact the overall quality of the data collected. If you’re interested in learning more about the reasons behind high dropout rates in online surveys, we recommend checking out this insightful blog post on Online surveys suffering from high dropout rates? This may be why. It provides valuable insights and strategies to mitigate this issue, ensuring a higher completion rate and more reliable survey results.

Because a generic link gives you less control over who’ll respond, it’s important to set a survey quota target. This will ensure you receive a representative sample of responses from your target audience and reach your desired sample size, while helping prevent the survey from being over-subscribed.

To set up a survey quota target in Nfield, simply navigate to the Quotas tab and define your target based on the relevant criteria (e.g. age, gender, location). Further information can be found in NIPO Academy #27 Quota: Existing features and new additions.

How to generate generic survey links in Nfield:

Simply navigate to the Nfield Launch panel and select “Copy Live Link” under the “Copy Interview Links” session to retrieve your survey’s generic link.

In conclusion

Whether you should opt for a generic or unique links for each online survey depends on your specific goals and objectives. If you need to track individual responses or personalize the survey experience, then unique links are the way to go. On the other hand, if you need to reach a large audience quickly or maintain participant anonymity, then a generic link is the best option.

If you have any questions about survey link types and how to generate them in Nfield, please feel free to contact helpdesk@nipo.com.

As a highly responsible SaaS provider to market research companies, NIPO, the company behind Nfield, fully understands the importance of protecting personal data and safeguarding against potential data breaches. Alongside our own comprehensive measures to prevent data breaches and swiftly lock down in the event of these being bypassed, we are also committed to helping our clients do all they can to protect their valuable data within the Nfield platform.

Prevention

NIPO has the following measures in place to prevent data breaches:

• Encryption – All sensitive data stored in our servers (in the Azure cloud) is encrypted via strong algorithms. This means that even if an attacker gains access to the data, they will not be able to read it without the encryption key.

• Access Controls – We have strict access controls which ensure only authorized personnel can get into our servers and databases. We also have regular reviews of access rights to make sure they are up-to-date and appropriate.

• Network Security – We have robust network security measures in place, including firewalls, intrusion detection and prevention systems, and other security tools. These help us to detect external threats and prevent malicious parties from gaining access to our network and systems. Nfield runs in the Microsoft Azure cloud, which is, itself, highly secure and monitored 24/7 by Microsoft’s own engineers.

• Security Measures for Programming Code – Like many other organizations, we use a variety of security tools to check our programming code and test it for security vulnerabilities. In addition to these, we also have security checks carried out by external third-parties, such as Secura, to ensure our code is thoroughly tested and secure.

• Employee Training – We provide our employees with regular training and awareness programs to ensure they are kept up-to-date on the latest security threats and how to prevent them. This includes training on topics such as phishing emails, social engineering attacks, and password security.

Data breach handling

In the unlikely event of a data breach, NIPO has a dedicated incident response team that follows a well-defined plan to mitigate the impact. This plan includes the following steps:

• Investigation – We immediately launch an investigation to determine the cause and extent of the breach.

• Containment – Once we have identified the source of the breach, we take immediate steps to contain it and prevent any further unauthorized access to our systems.

• Notification – We notify any affected clients as required by law or contractual obligations. We are committed to being transparent and open with our clients about any potential security incidents.

• Remediation – We take steps to remediate any damage caused by the breach, such as restoring backups or implementing new security measures. We also conduct a post-incident review to identify any lessons learned and make improvements to our security measures.

What you can do to protect your respondent data

It is also vitally important that market researchers implement all available measures to protect respondents’ personal data and adhere to GDPR, or other applicable local regulations. At NIPO, we provide resources to help our clients with this, including our GDPR and Nfield Toolkit.

Here are some other simple steps you can take, which include making use of tools and features included in our Nfield platform:

• Data Minimization – Collect only the minimum amount of personal data necessary for each research project. Once you have it, this data should only be kept for as long as absolutely necessary, and then securely disposed of.
  
  We also advise clients to store personal identifiers in the sample table, which will enable you to easily delete sample data from the survey by pseudonymizing or anonymizing it. You can do this for all the sample data, for only specific sample data fields, for all interviews, or for a selection of interviews. This allows you to maintain detailed management of which data you keep in Nfield.
  
  Recently, we also introduced a new automatic survey clean-up feature into Nfield, which deletes inactive surveys that have reached their expiration date. For information about this, see keeping Nfield domains clean helps clients ensure compliance, security, and efficient working.

• Use Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) – This gives accounts an extra layer of security, so that even if an attacker does obtain a password, they still won’t be able to gain access because they won’t have the second code necessary. Read Protecting your Nfield login with two-factor authentication.

• Use the latest Anti-Virus Software – Installing and keeping anti-virus software up-to-date can help protect against malware and other security threats.

• Be Security-Aware – Market researchers should be aware of the latest security threats, such as phishing emails, and take steps to avoid them. This includes not clicking on suspicious links or downloading attachments from unknown sources.

Committed to protecting data

At NIPO, we are committed to protecting personal data and safeguarding against potential data breaches. By implementing a comprehensive security strategy and incident response plan, we are prepared to handle any potential security incidents quickly and effectively. We also provide resources and guidance to help our customers protect themselves and adhere to GDPR regulations. With our commitment to data security, NIPO remains a trusted partner for market researchers looking to conduct research in a secure and compliant manner.

IMPORTANT: suspected data breach?

If you suspect a data breach or security incident related to your use of NIPO’s services, please report it immediately by contacting our Data Protection Officer at helpdesk@nipo.com. Reporting a suspected data breach promptly helps us to take swift action to contain and mitigate the impact of the incident. We take all reports of data breaches seriously and have a dedicated team in place to investigate and respond to incidents as quickly as possible.

Since the launch on 29 March 2013, Nfield has grown to a large scale platform used for data collection around the globe. Nfield is NIPO’s cloud-based Online and CAPI survey solution for market research professionals

Voice and video recordings are often used in Online and CAPI surveys to extract deeper responses. But what respondents say and do in these recordings doesn’t always tell you what they really think. You can, however, use voice analysis software to reveal the true emotions behind spoken words.  

Politeness isn’t always a virtue

Social norms mean people tend to behave politely when answering survey questions. And busy lifestyles mean they may not have fully thought through their responses.

Considering that 95% of purchasing decisions are subconscious¹, and 38% of vocal communication comes from tone of voice, rather than words themselves², it becomes clear that relying on words alone for market research can miss a lot of essential details. Consequentially, most researchers aren’t getting the information they need to understand what really matters to people and drives their behavior.

Unlocking emotional content

In our continual quest to keep Nfield at the forefront of professional market research, we came across a voice analysis solution called Phebi and decided to put it to the test.

Phebi analyzes speech and breaks it down into what has been said (sentiment) and how it was said (emotion). It does this by checking voice characteristics, such as pitch, rate and tone, every 3 seconds to detect and quantify the underlying emotions. Phebi’s methodology is based on well-accepted social science research and validated via 38,000+ hours of testing.

Phebi’s emotion analysis examines many factors to determine levels of five underlying emotions:

Having put it through its paces, we concluded that Phebi is a useful complement to Nfield Online and CAPI surveys instantly delivering accurate, quantified analysis of people’s nonconscious responses that goes beyond the words they say.

We were also impressed by Phebi’s auto transcription and translation function. In CAPI interviews, we found it could differentiate between interviewers’ and respondents’ voices.

Phebi features include:

• See the emotional landscape with a one-click set of summary reports
• View items of interest in rank order by positive emotional response
• Get summaries that reveal the most intense emotion by topic and more
• Understand respondents by listening to them and seeing emotions
• Easily manage and search within audio and video responses. Uncover ‘micro-moments’ of peak emotion in longer answers. Tell stories and highlight key findings by dragging and dropping to create show reels.
• Work cross-border with local language voice capture and translation
• Instant, accurate, affordable transcription & translation
• Exchange data bi-directionally via CSV or SPSS files, export via PDFs

Connecting Nfield & Phebi

Phebi can easily be used to analyze Nfield voice recordings via a simple connection.

Recordings from Nfield Online surveys can be automatically uploaded to Phebi’s server. For Nfield CAPI surveys, you should continue using the built-in Nfield recorder and upload all your audio files to Phebi in batch.

After feeding your audio recordings into Phebi, you’ll immediately be able to see various reports, such as the ones shown below, in the Phebi portal.

If you are interested in using Phebi’s software, please contact them directly at marketing@phebi.ai for a live demonstration and answers to all your questions about their product.

Note: Phebi’s servers are located in the USA, Europe (Germany) and Australia.

^{1 G. Haltman
2 A. Mehrabian, UCLA}

As a creator of truly purposeful survey solutions, we want every user to be able to get the best out of them. That means ensuring our customers fully understand what our products are capable of and how to utilize that capability to their own advantage. 

Because our Nfield survey platform offers such a wide range of features, specifically designed to meet professional market researchers’ needs, there is a great deal to know. We therefore take a step-by-step approach to educating every individual customer, so the right knowledge is gained at the right time and nobody ever feels overwhelmed.

The Nfield learning process starts while you’re still considering whether we’re right for you. If you decide to come on board with us, we’ll get you fully up-to-speed using your product and continue providing guidance and, if required, access to external support services, for as long as you are an Nfield user.

1. While you’re deciding if Nfield is right for you

A member of the NIPO Sales Team in your region will discuss your specific needs and determine whether, and how, Nfield can meet them. We want to forge successful long-term partnerships which means making sure you’ll be delighted with our service, so we start by carefully assessing whether we are right for each other. 

While doing this, we’ll talk you through the various features Nfield offers for conducting online, face-to-face and (soon) telephone research, as necessary. We’ll point out the things you’ll need to consider, such as the possibility of needing additional training on some of our more advanced features or paid-for optional services (e.g. scripting, styling) delivered by an external partner. 

Of course you’ll be keen to see Nfield in action, so we are happy to oblige via a live demo. We’ll schedule an online session that demonstrates scenarios related to your own requirements. Upon request, we can record the session so you can then share it with others in your organization.

2. Getting you started

Once you’ve signed up to Nfield, the sales representative you dealt with will hand you over to a member of our support team, who’ll work with you to get you up and running. Because the NIPO sales and support teams are closely integrated, the information we’ve already shared will be readily available to every support team member. So you won’t have to explain yourself all over again and they will be fully prepared to set you up. 

We’ll start with a free 2-hour introductory training session, during which you’ll learn how to use the system and launch a survey, as well as other basics which are relevant to your specific needs. You’ll then be ready to start putting Nfield to work.

We’ll introduce you to our support website where you can access documentation, training and NIPO Academy videos, consult support cases and get useful tools.

3. Helpdesk support

You’ll have access to our Helpdesk support team who’ll be happy to help with any problem you might encounter. Our support policy is to respond within 24 hours, but in practice we usually address queries much sooner. Support is free and provided from 2 locations: Amsterdam and Mumbai.  In the event that your closest support center can’t respond fast enough, another center will handle the issue so you’re not kept waiting. There are no limitations to the number of support queries you can submit. If we feel the type of support requests indicate additional training is required, we’ll discuss this with you.

4. Ongoing Training

Via the NIPO Academy, we regularly present free webinars about new Nfield features, best practices and troubleshooting. You can see a recent session wherein we did the Nfield Online introduction training session.

5. Advanced Training

Once you’ve become comfortable with using Nfield, you might want to get trained in advanced skills such as scripting, effective fieldwork management, safeguarding email reputation and many more. ODIN scripting, which gives you the power to fully customize NIPO survey functionality, is a particularly popular course. A lot of Nfield users also like to bring us in to train their newcomers. Please note that Advanced Training and onboarding new personnel are paid-for services.

6. External Services

Because some of our customers prefer to focus on their core market research activities, rather than also getting involved with more technical matters, NIPO has teamed up with an external partner to offer services for:

• Scripting: to customize questionnaire structure and logic.
• Theming: to develop custom look and feel (useful for branded surveys).
• Visualization: to advise on data processing and visualization of collected data.
• Hosting: to host and manage surveys in Nfield.

7. Become certified

Nfield users who have acquired sufficient knowledge to independently conduct research on the Nfield platform have the opportunity to get certified. NIPO provides a training and certification program with courses that teach you more about survey scripting, ODIN Developer capabilities, managing fieldwork and market research in general. More information.

Ensuring your success

Our onboarding process and follow-up support and services enable every customer to get the most out of Nfield. From feeling comfortable at the start to becoming an expert over time, with access to all the materials, information, tools and services you need to work in the most productive way.

If you’d like more information on how we can help you, please contact us at info@nipo.com.

See what Nfield can do for you, ask us for a live demo.

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.

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}

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.

NIPO has released a Markdown theme to be used on top of the NfieldChicago template. With this theme you can use various Markdown language commands in your survey to highlight text, organize the survey page and style your survey. In this series of NIPO Academy sessions we will explain how to use this theme and demo some of the new options it provides.

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!

In this new series of NIPO Academy sessions we will do a short recap of the standard fieldwork report, but most time will be spent on how to create a private data repository and how you can use this to create your own reports.

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.

Recently NIPO introduced Survey performance for Nfield Online, as part of fieldwork monitoring. Survey performance metrics are very important to make sure that your survey is technically running fine. But perhaps even more crucial is that these metrics give insights in how your respondents are experiencing your surveys.