First Look: Mindcanvas

Mindcanvas is a research service that employs game-oriented research techniques and intuitive visualization technologies to help realize product and service features:

[from MindCanvas | A research service from Uzanto]

MindCanvas is a rapid research service to gather insights about your 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 rich visualizations for you to explore.

The group have developed a manifesto for GEM, which includes this insight: “Research methods must allow you to explore the subjective, the implicit and the unconscious. Much of human thought lies below awareness. It’s high time we tapped into what’s beneath the surface.” Yes!

The game-oriented techniques include “Divide the Dollar” where test subjects are given a finite amount of cash to divide across various potential features:

And visualization techniques include Dendogram, VocabularyBrowzer, SimilarityBrowzer, ListMap, CategoryMatrix (coming soon), OnionMap (coming soon), MindGraph (coming soon), and the WeightMap, where various features or statements are depicted on blocks representing the degree to which test subjects agreed with them:

My Take

I can’t tell you how many hundreds of times over the years I have worked on product feature analysis, and every time I wished for something like Mindcanvas. Simple Q&A surveys never arrayed themselves into something visually compelling, where the message jumps out.

I will certainly steer my clients toward Mindcanvas, and I expect that GEM will be showing up all over.

[pointer from Leisa Reichelt]