In 2012 there has been a massive growth in conferences focused on mobile research, and on mobile sessions in regular conferences. Mobile research has been the next big thing for about fifteen years, but the number of people who feel it has arrived is growing.
One of the reasons that people feel mobile has arrived is that respondents are voting with their fingers. A growing number of respondents are using smartphones to complete our surveys, even when we haven’t asked them.
As a share of all market research, mobile is smaller than postal. But, the spread of postal and mobile is very different. Postal is restricted to a small sub-set of agencies and research problems, most modern researcher won’t come across a postal study in a normal year, and may never come across one. By contrast, most researchers will find some of their respondents are using mobile devices to complete their surveys, and I suspect many researchers will be involved in research that specifically seeks to utilise mobile devices in 2013.
If most researchers are going to encounter mobile research they need to get up to speed with the basics and the best practices. Luckily there are two online training sessions in a couple of weeks, as part of the Festival of NewMR’s Training Day, Monday December 3rd.
The first session is at 3pm, Sydney time (midday in Singapore) and will see Lachlan Stokoe provide insight into mobile research best practices. A few hours later, at 3pm GMT (10am in New York) Kam Sidhu of Lumi Technologies will share an introduction into mobile research.
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