By Andrew Grenville, Chief Research Officer – Vision Critical

The market research world will undergo tremendous transformations over the next decade. There will be industry-altering births, deaths, explosions and implosions. Here are four things that will define survey research in the coming year and decade.

1. Terrible DIY research will almost kill the industry, but research will arise leaner, meaner and smarter.

With access to Survey Monkey, Zoomerang and the like, coupled with cheap access panels and other sources of questionable sample, everyone thinks they can do research. While many people are making excellent use of these tools, there are also too many who are using them badly—and that’s where the trouble starts. Misleading results are being shared with management, the media and anyone who will listen. As poor quality research proliferates, the bad decisions made based on questionable research will bring about a crisis of confidence in research. There will be fallout for Market Research departments and research suppliers. Jobs will be lost. Budgets will be slashed. But it won’t be the end of research. Because information and insights will always be needed, the boardroom won’t give up on survey research. What they will do is question the basics of how the research was done. They’ll think twice about sources of bias and error. Audiences will ask better questions of researchers. Bad research will be exposed. Good research will be revealed, and valued all the more.

2. Social Media: hot, then cold, then some hot spots.

If marketing was a dance, the latter half of the last decade would be known as the Social Marketing Stumble. In this past decade marketers and researchers fell all over themselves trying to understand and capitalise on social media. Over this next decade, social media will evolve into a multiplicity of types of social mediums. Some will lend themselves to commercial use, others will not. Privacy issues and concerns about surveillance will play a vital role in transforming the use of social mediums. Money will cease being sprayed around like water on a fire. Everyone will stop trying to make viral videos (we hope). After all, viral isn’t something you make, it’s something you earn.

3. Survival of the simplest.

Evolution favours the most parsimonious effective design. So do people. Research will become simpler; more streamlined. Interfaces (formerly known as questionnaires) will become more intuitive, because respondents do not have the patience or incentive to navigate complex and poorly designed surveys. Similarly, shared insights (formerly known as reports and tables) will focus on meaning. Boring tables and convoluted explanations of intricate analyses will be stripped to the essential, except for the handful of geeks for whom footnotes rightly matter. Visible complexity will go the way of the dinosaurs. Simplicity will rule.

4. It takes a village to write a strong survey.

Powerful forces like crowdsourcing and social media have been made possible by technological advances that enable group collaboration. Survey design is certain to follow suit. Currently, drafting and reviewing surveys is a complicated process where drafts are sent by one to many and then printed, marked up, and sent back in multiple formats, some with the changes marked and some not. The (un)lucky coordinator then must try to juggle all the comments, create another draft and communicate the rationale to the many who did not see each others comments. All in all the process is a time-consuming and tedious nightmare just waiting for a smarter way. If some of the collaborative tools like Google Wave and Google Docs offer us hints, soon researchers will be empowered with real time comments and changes, visible to all; a way to understand each others input; a chance to truly collaborate and reap the benefits of working together.