Online surveys - and an acquisition

Back when I was out of work last year, I started (amongst many other things online) doing more surveys online. Sorry, market research, not surveys.

In spite of what’s said about doing surveys online, it’s not a very lucrative way of earning money, and some of the research places don’t actually offer cash direct, but various other ways of spending the points you earn, which personally I could do without.

I’m one of those people who enjoys doing surveys, although I must admit that some online surveys are very boring in their layout. They don’t fit on the screen well, and they ask the same questions over and over, on screen after screen – until you want to scream.

I’ve always thought face-to-face surveys that just asked the same questions for page after page were badly organised, and it’s the same online. I’ve thrown the towel in with some of them, because they get tedious, and all you can think is: when will this ever end?

On the other hand, some survey companies have made use of the Net’s capabilities rather more, using short videos, and even recreating ads on screen. This is a far better way to go, and shows that some researchers have become more innovative. Let’s hope others follow in their footsteps.

Apropos of all this, I see that yet another NZ company has been taken over, this time Research Solutions, which has been acquired by Synovate. Well, well, NZ will soon be entirely owned by overseas interests and then we won’t have to worry about anything any more!

Standardization - not!

It’s strange the things we take for granted: I’d assumed that the QWERTY keyboard layout was the standard (obviously apart from those countries that don’t use the same alphabet), but nope! Even in England there are some differences in layout, though at least here the differences relate to the #, the £, and the @ which are all in strange places.

But when I was in Luxembourg, I discovered that the alphabetical letters are swapped around as well: not enough to make things totally unfamiliar, but certainly more than enough to cause confusion when you’re typing passwords and such: the sorts of things that you take for granted, and don’t bother to check when you’re typing. Seemingly the people in Luxembourg tend to use the French keyboard – and of course those jolly French people couldn’t possibly have the same keyboard as the English. It would just not be the done thing!

You can check out some of the variations in keyboard layouts here.