5 Tips

Best practices for designing Experience Sampling Method (ESM) &

Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA) Studies for Smartphones.

For Smartphone

ESM/EMA

What is

ESM & EMA?

Experience Sampling

Method (ESM) &

Ecological

Momentary

Assessment (EMA)

• Share a need to poll

participants in-the-moment

or at the time of experience

• This provides researchers

with higher quality and

more valid data that is not

subject to recall or

reconstruction bias.

Why

Smartphones?

Smartphones are Ubiquitous

Pen, paper & pre-programmed pagers are out of date

Smartphone applications like MetricWire are perfect for in-the-moment insights

Smartphones are with us constantly

Leverage the onboard sensors & technology

Tip #1

Reduce the Amount of

Questions in Your Surveys

Efficiency is Key

Long surveys on mobile are intrusive

Mobile users are used to fast, refined motions

Consider breaking a long survey into multiple surveys pushed at different times

Lessen the burden of lengthy surveys and decrease satisficing (selecting the quickest route to the end of the survey)

People use their smartphones for quick,

engaging actions. Do not lose their

interest with a 100 question survey on a

small screen!

Remember

Tip #2

Space Your Prompts Wisely

Engagement vs. Annoyance

It is a good idea to space prompts/interventions where they become part of your participants’ daily habits

Too many prompts can become an intrusion

There is a fine line between a study that engages participants and one that annoys them

MetricWire has many d ifferent trigger types that

allow you to customize when and where your

participants receive notifications.

The Random Trigger option is helpful in running

ESM & EMA studies.

Tip #3

Choose Optimal Question Types

Optimization

Depending on the question set, optimize your survey by choosing the most efficient question types

Likert-style sliding scales for experience rating questions can help facilitate the speed of the survey and reduce intervention time

The slid ing scale creates d istance between two polar

points, allowing your participants to slide through the

choices easily, rather than scrolling through a list of

single-select questions, check-boxes, or vaguely

inputting open-ended text

Tip #4

Test Your Study Before Deploying

Progress Not Perfection

Your study may look perfect during setup, but it still might not work the way you want it to

It is a good practice to test how your app is going to function under the conditions that you’ve programmed

By doing a trial

run, you can

work out many

of the kinks that

could hinder data

collection, and

lessen the

amount of time

you spend

dealing with

issues.

Tip #5

Change Variables That Don’t Work

Data-Driven Decisions

Real-time data means that you can actively track your participants in-the-moment

Managing prompts in real-time allows you to make alterations to your study or prompts without having to restart or rebuild the study

This is an added bonus to evaluate how well your study is working

We can see by these survey statistics, that although there are 7

participants invited , it seems as though only 2 have responded, and

looks as though one of them has dropped out

There are also 34 triggers that have fired , yet only 5 surveys have

actually been completed

This leads us to believe that some part of the survey may be inefficient

for participants to finish, and needs to be altered immediately

Conclusions

Reduce the Amount of Questions in

Your Surveys

Space Your Prompts Wisely

Choose Optimal Question Types

Test Your Study Before Deploying

Change Variables That Don’t Work

MetricWire is the world’s most advanced data collection and analysis platform for

smartphone research. We offer smartphone technology for Experience Sampling and

Ecological Momentary Assessment that cannot be matched . To learn more about

our technology check out our website:

www.metricwire.com

Check out our blog to read more about more about smartphone research methods

and the researchers who are doing amazing things with the MetricWire platform.

www.metricwire.com/ blog

If you have any questions, comments or want to learn more about the platform,

send us a message today and we’ll get back to you ASAP

info@metricwire.com