We should consider what we mean by ‘online’. Back in the day it was all very straight-forward. Basically it meant having a copy of Netscape Navigator a phone line and lots of patience. These days online is all pervasive, its anywhere and everywhere. The devices, or user-agents, which connect us to the online world, enable us to conduct research with varying degrees of ease and value. Today the vast majority of online research is still conducted by respondents using PCs.

As mobile devices continue to evolve they will have an increasing role to play, as will the TV in your lounge, the Xbox, PlayStation and future generations of Internet enabled devices. In reality what we are seeing is a convergence of technical standards coupled with faster, cheaper Internet access and ever increasing cultural adoption to the point where anything with an On-button will have a role to play in the online world and potentially in the online research future.

Mobile phones are of interest to researchers because they are ubiquitous and therefore represent an opportunity to connect with large numbers of people. As of fairly recently the choice for researchers wanting to use these devices was SMS text messaging or WAP specific content. SMS text messaging as a research tool is limited to the very simplest of ‘questionnaires’. In reality just a single question can be asked and as a technique it is of extremely limited use for full market research studies. It has however been used as a research tool with great success by the entire generation of reality TV shows, and is of course their raison d'être, delivering generous revenues whilst being simple to use. WAP, (Wireless Application Protocol) specific content failed to gain a foothold in the UK market in the early days. This was due to it being over-hyped and miserably failing to deliver on just about any measure. Content was sparse, simplistic, slow to load, complicated to set-up and expensive. Although technically possible, (ORS delivered an early proof of concept), WAP specific online surveys did not materialise.

Over the last year or so the movement in the mobile-phone market, led by the likes of Apple’s iPhone, has shifted to better enabling devices to deliver existing online content rather than be restricted to using mobile specific protocols such as WAP and WML, (Wireless Markup Language). As adoption of these devices grows, online research will be conducted using a wider variety of connected devices.

Whatever the technologies and hardware employed the practical challenges of online research will always be to efficiently deliver a meaningful set of questions to the right people in a manner that enhances the chances of them being answered. We must collect the data, keep it secure and make the results available to the right people with the minimum of fuss and in a manner which maximises the value hidden in our research findings.