Online Bulletin Board
An online bulletin board is a type of group interview, comparable to a focus group.
Contents
Description
Participants are invited to a web portal with the intent of discussing, reacting to, and interacting with some stimuli. These web portals are usually modeled after modern social media for intuitive UX, e.g. Instagram reels, Steam store page, etc.
Examples of portal activities include:
- Discussion board
- Can be participant-to-reseacher
- Can be public
- Image/video markup
- Sort and Rank/Card-sort
- Fill in the Blanks
- Surveys
- Live Chat
Can have multimedia components (e.g., encourage participants to upload 'selfie-style' video).
Data
The web portal offers complete control over the experience and treatment of participants.
These studies aim for days, if not weeks, of data collection. The repeated nature gives ample opportunity to monitor attrition and inattention. Phases of the study can be adjusted on-the-fly to give more time to inactive participants, or to accelerate the timeline to keep the attention of active participants. The data can start to look like a highly-engaged panel.
Participant cohorts are not usually large enough to justify separate treatment and control groups, but pre- and post-stimuli measurements are common.
Compared to a panel survey where the questionnaire is static and/or expensive to iterate upon, the web portal provides opportunities to collect general reactions and subsequently drill down to specific challenges as they emerge from the participants' responses.
Screen engagement (eye tracking, mouse tracking, etc.) can be collected. Heat maps are common for visualizing and analyzing this type of data.
Immediate reactions to stimuli can be collected as 'likes' and emojis, which can be directly quantified. For an audio or video stimuli, these can then be trended over the media's duration.