Background
FocusVision (now known as Forsta) is an online survey for market research company. It is a fully scalable end to end solution with an in-house team dedicated to optimizing and testing survey layouts for web and mobile devices, as well as logical progression of questions for best respondent experience.
FocusVision surveys do not involve a moderator asking questions so they need to be engaging, legible, and clear on every device to reduce survey abandonment rates and maximize return on investment for customers.
The Challenge
The increasing use of mobile devices to access the web has become a challenge for the market research industry. Researchers are familiar with designing online surveys to display on PC devices. But now they must accommodate smaller screens and touch devices such as tablets and smartphones to deliver the same, or better, rate of completion as desktop.
Figures show that survey completion rates on mobile are much lower than on desktop and tablet. “Mobile-first” responsive interfaces reduce performance on desktop due to differences in the granularity offered by mouse or touch screen interfaces and the number of questions that can be displayed comfortably.
Without altering the layout and user interface for mobile phone devices, there is an increased risk that questions may not be answered or the survey may be abandoned altogether.
FocusVision recognized the criticality of ensuring the correct user experience is delivered by quickly and accurately evaluating the requesting device’s screen size and supported input methods. As a market-leading research company, FocusVision had been working on this problem for a number of years using a competing device detection service. However, concerns over the incumbent solutions performance, accuracy and commercial model materialized in mid-2014 resulted in a review of alternative professionally maintained solutions.
More people complete an engaging survey tailored to the specific device type. Erwin AndreasenCTO, FocusVision
The Solution
51Degrees detects 2,833,079 unique combinations of browser, operating system, and hardware across a database of 87,555 devices which grows daily. Whatever type of device is being used to participate in a survey, 51Degrees can accurately identify it.
Simple integration with Python made running 51Degrees in parallel an easy way to assess improvements. FocusVision found the optimized data structure used by 51Degrees to be faster and more resource efficient than the JSON format used by the previous solution provider. Other services were unable to provide a comparable library but forced usage of their own long-running services or even dedicated virtual machines running a full Java or Microsoft stack. 51Degrees used a universally portable and efficient C-based implementation.
Delivering surveys that load without delay, with legible content that is optimized dependent on the user’s device, provides a competitive edge. FocusVision can build surveys for its clients tailored to any sophisticated smartphone or lower specification phone, safe in the knowledge that accurate and up to date device information has been provided by 51Degrees.
The Result
The implementation of 51Degrees has provided FocusVisions’s customers with a significant level of flexibility, enabling clients to maximize their return on investment.
Since using 51Degrees, FocusVision has seen completion rates on mobile devices increase and 51Degrees Device Detection continues to play its part in supporting these improved results. FocusVision can now deliver the very best completion rate on all devices whether it is a desktop, tablet, feature phone or smartphone.
If you'd like to join FocusVision and reap the benefits of 51Degrees Device Detection, ask us about a free trial today.