Whether you sell insurance policies, magazines or daily lunches, understanding your customers should be the number one priority for your business. However, identifying their preferences can be challenging task if you are not sure how to ask the right questions.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to quickly gain valuable insights in your consumer preferences, without putting too much pressure on your customers. In other words, this tutorial will demonstrate how to gain the most information without asking too much of your customers.
To illustrate this, let’s assume you are indeed in the business of serving daily lunches at your company canteen, and you are interested how to improve your menu and which products to use. To do so, you will create a simple forced-choice task based on different categories. In this tutorial, we will assume that the available products are already known beforehand, so your framework of possible insights is established.
This allows us to dive directly into creating the food-preference task:
1) Create an experiment
- Select Experiments in menu on the left side of the screen
- Select Add new (green button) to add a new experiment
- Insert experiment Title, Informed Consent, Briefing and Debriefing
- Click on Save
In this experiment we used the following text, feel free to copy, change or adapt it:
Informed consent & Study information:
Welcome to this short and anonymous test for food preferences. In this test, your privacy is respected and your answers are processed in accordance with the GDPR: If you submitted your email address, it is possible at any time to view or delete your answers.
Briefing:
The goal of this test is to pick the preferred out of two food options. The task will take a maximum of two minutes.
Select ‘Next’ to proceed to the task instructions!
Debriefing:
Thank you for your participation, the results will be made available on the new menu.
The results will remain completely anonymous and will only be used for the purpose of this tutorial.
You can now safely close this screen.
2) Creating the task
- Select Manage Tasks on the Experiments screen
- Select Create New Task (green button)
- Insert Task title
- Select the Type of task, which is Statements with categories
- Add instructions for your participant
- Tick ‘Show questions in sequential order’
- Click on Add/Update
In this experiment we used the following text for the task instructions, feel free to copy, change or adapt it:
Task Instructions:
For this task, please hold your smartphone in landscape-mode so you can indicate your preference with your thumbs (left or right).
Ready? Then proceed to the task by clicking ‘Next’, it will start right away!
3) Creating the product categories
- Select Manage Questions (green button) on the Tasks screen
- Insert your product category and select Create Category (blue button)
- Repeat until all product categories are added
Note: The categories can be deleted at any time by selecting ‘Delete’ on the Questions screen. The categories used in this example have been selected for a study among Dutch food marketeers, but you can change them to your liking.
4) Creating the questions
In this tutorial we use the product pairs listed in this spreadsheet, which are based on an existing research with food marketeers in the Netherlands. Feel free to use the pairs listed in the Google spreadsheet, but is also possible to design new categories, add new products or switch the products around within the list (make sure they remain in the same category though).
To add questions:
- On the questions screen select Add New (blue button)
- Insert your product names in the ‘Question’ prompts.
- Select the corresponding category from the drop-down menu
- Select Create New Question (blue button)
- Repeat until you added all product pairs
Note: The questions can be edited or deleted at any time by selecting ‘Edit’ or ‘Delete’ on the Questions screen.
5) How to quickly create all questions at once
As you might anticipate, creating all the questions one-by-one can prove to be a tedious task. Therefore, Resultal has the option to import all questions from an Excel-sheet (csv). First, make sure that you created all categories and at least one question:
- On the questions screen select Export (green button) to download a template
- In this template you can add all products and the category numbers, separated by commas, but we already prepared the template for you. Download it here (File - Download - Comma separated file)
- Since the categories are not global but linked to your account, you need to replace the category numbers in the template with the category numbers from your experiment. They can be found on the questions page in the box that displays the existing categories (look for ‘id’).
Note: Make sure that all category numbers match, otherwise it will result in an error!
- Once you replaced the category numbers, you can import the file. On the questions screen select Import (yellow button) and upload the csv-file. Resultal will now automatically create all your questions and categories at once!
- Since importing questions adds them to the list — as opposed to replacing them — you need to remove potential duplicates in the list by selecting ‘Delete’ (red button). Look for the questions with the lowest ID in the first column.
6) Preview and share your task
Now that all questions are added, it is time to make sure that everything is according to standards:
- On the Task screen, select Preview this experiment (yellow button) to test your task and check whether something needs to added or improved
- Once you are satisfied with the task, go to the Experiments screen
- Select QR + code to distribute your task (black button)
- Share the QR-code and/or the link with your participants. You can reach them by sending the QR-code or link by e-mail, share it through social media, or collect your online data on location
That’s it! Now that the task is finished, you can watch the results come in trough the platform. Go to Chart Results or Participant Overview to see the results in your dashboard. If you want to download and/or analyse your results you can retrieve the .csv-file on the Data / Downloads screen
If you want to recreate this tutorial please go to Resultal to setup your account. If you have more questions or feedback, feel free to contact us through Twitter or LinkedIn
