Editor’s note: Leslie Townsend is CEO and Co-founder at research firm Kinesis Survey Technologies, Austin, Texas. This is an edited version of a post that originally appeared here under the title, “Choice is overrated: How anticipatory design will change the market research industry.”
Stand back … it’s not about responsive design any more. According to an article published by Fast Company, the next big thing in the marriage of design and technology is to reduce the number of choices people have to make by introducing anticipatory design.
Technology has undeniably revolutionized the way we live and do business. However, in almost every industry great digital design has put users in control and has effectively increased the number of decisions we have to make, resulting in decision fatigue causing shorter attention spans.
Anticipatory design has the potential to provide products, services and experiences that eliminate needless choices from our lives by making them on our behalf, freeing us up to focus on the ones we really care about.
How will this anticipatory design translate to the market research industry?
Surveys
To start, anticipatory design could affect how we design surveys. Anticipatory designed surveys would be increasingly shorter as many panelists’ answers would be predetermined. A well-designed survey already needs to be tailored to each panelist based on his or her previous responses and personal preferences through conditional logic. With anticipatory design personalization may extend well beyond this reach: the ability to pre-populate data where known; show most frequently selected choices first; and reach to external data sources such as social media, web analytics and even geolocation data to offer answer choices are all moving into the realm of possibility for the data collection platform of the future.
In order to achieve the level of convenience promised by anticipatory design, data must be collected, analyzed and then repackaged in the form of predetermined selections which could cause serious concerns around panelist and data biases – not to mention the privacy and security nightmare it could create!
Panel management and community
While panel management is already increasingly automated, there may be ways to use anticipatory design within this function. Again, much of the advances may come at the risk of response bias. In terms of panel management, anticipatory design might best come into play under more algorithmic means such as scheduling invitations to fit specific individuals patterns and determining if panelists are likely to download apps or engage in longitudinal research based upon prior responses and patterns.
We certainly don’t have the answers yet but two things are clear:
- In the future, the best interface will be no interface at all and the best decisions will be made without having to make them (but according to your personal preferences and goals).
- As design and technology advances continue to merge into increased automation, we in the market research industry will need to start having some serious conversations about advancing our own products and services while upholding the integrity of our data.