MindCanvas – Reinventing online customer research

I must confess that I am feeling the way parents feel when their first child is born. When you have been involved in creating something from conception to delivery, you feel a sense of elation and accomplishment while being nervous in anticipation of the future. Off course, whether the child grows up to be an Einstein or a Frankenstein, only time will tell…

Uzanto launched its research service, MindCanvas a couple of days ago. Backed up by a full year of intense development work, this is our attempt to redefine online customer research from the lifeless state in which it exists today. Sounds grand ? ………it is, so let me explain.

“ MindCanvas is a research service to help companies gather insights about customers’ thoughts & feelings. Online surveys require users to complete boring HTML forms. We use ‘Game-like Elicitation Methods’ (GEMs) to let online users participate in answering the complex questions that you face in designing a product or service. Our Visual Analysis Engine lets us rapidly mine the reams of data and create reports in the form of rich visualizations called ‘Deliverables to go’ which allows researchers to explore the data in a highly interactive manner. “

Check out our website home page for 5 minutes and let me know if you don’t get the gist of it.

Game-like Elicitation Methods are a playful and game like method of extracting feedback and insights about your product. These methods use game design principles and style (drag and drop, graphics, audio, animations, etc) to make the data collection process a gamelike experience. The idea is that, if users have a more enjoyable experience while giving feedback, then they give you better quality feedback, which is interlaced with deeper customer insights. This further translates into better reports and recommendations on which to base your product decisions. Check out the GEM Manifesto to understand this better.

GEM (as an intellectual property) is our creation. We have conceptualized, developed and tested it thoroughly and now we are introducing this to the world. We are convinced that while Uzanto or MindCanvas may be small, GEM can be big; it has the potential to add a completely new dimension to online customer research. Online research has become so predictable and lifeless with bored users mechanically ticking checkboxes and dropdowns to answer HTML based surveys ; something was needed to shake it up; GEM could be just the breath of fresh air, the doctor ordered for it.

The other USP of MindCanvas is that instead of giving clients excel sheets, bar graphs & pie charts as reports, we analyze the results in our Visual Analysis Engine, and package it into intuitive interactive visualizations. The end-users of the results, the designer/researcher do not need to know any statistics or data analysis. They get rich visualizations with a few knobs and sliders that they can adjust based on their needs. Additionally, these are ‘Deliverables to go’ - meaning the deliverables are self-contained files that you can email, embed into PowerPoint presentations, copy/share with colleagues as you please.

I must add that , MindCanvas does not currently cater to every kind of online research method. It focuses on methods specific to the discipline of Information Architecture, User Needs analysis and positioning of brands & products.

Viewed in a bigger sense, MindCanvas seeks to carve out a unique new place for itself at the crossroads of usability, market research and the best of web 2.0 technologies like RIAs, AJAX.

We think that MindCanvas is a first (or a near-first) in more ways than one; here’s how -

- It is amongst the first (I am aware of one other company) research platforms that use a rich internet application based survey tool.

- It is certainly the first to apply anything remotely similar to Game like Elicitation Methods for online customer research.

- It is amongst the very few (there are two others that I know of) customer research platforms that give more emphasis to images and pictures than to textual matter (remember what Gerald Zaltman says - human thought is based on images not words)

- It is definitely the first, which seeks to employ the sorting methodology as a generic alternative to asking people direct questions in the survey (remember what Malcolm Gladwell says – don’t ask direct questions, use associative methods)

- It is the first to replace usual research reports with something like ‘Deliverables to go’ – portable, standalone files containing rich visualizations that encapsulate your entire reports and can be copied, emailed, presented etc.

- It is not the first in this; but not many business applications would dare to attempt some of the technological acrobatics that we have done, as is captured in this comment from my colleague Kapil – “I like the way we convert raw data into visually appealing deliverables to go in a zippy. Very fast. Very robust. Very cool. Right from data download to giving it to SPSS for cluster analysis to giving XML to our analyst’s interface. Then to java - ant - flash and finally a single portable swf. Wow. The whole process is enthralling.”

- It would be amongst the very few projects where Macromedia Flash has been used as the core frontend platform for something as robust and demanding as our application.

If you want to read the complete vision behind MindCanvas, check out Rashmi’s post (she is a cognitive psychologist and our methods guru); if you wish to understand the technological aspects, check out Jon’s post (who is our technical architect) .

Wish us good luck as we step out into the big bad world of business with our brainchild.