A brief overview of the easyJet community, managed by Virtual Surveys. Plus, Virtual Surveys take outs from recent conferences, including improving online survey engagement and mobile surveys.

How do you discover what your customers think about your products? The answer is online panels and communities, which are all about user participation.

Social Networking is changing how people use the internet and what they expect from a website. What are the implications for research?

There is a great opportunity to create a new dialogue with customers and potentially completely change the way that research works.

10 Key Trends in Online Research

This paper aims to provide evidence that encouraging customers to bank online in fact offers opportunities to enhance customer loyalty. It also provides evidence, however, that many banks are currently not taking advantage of this opportunity and suggests some routes to change this.

The Internet has created new opportunities to use multivariate techniques, amongst the reasons for this are: the fact that sample sizes tend to be larger online and the power the Internet provides to use more complex designs. There have also been tremendous advances in the mathematics underlying this field, creating an exciting range of possibilities. This paper reviews how state-of-the-art conjoint and choice modelling is being implemented via the Internet.

Strong, disruptive changes are in place and are already beginning to re-shape the industry. Most of them are due to rapid advances in technology.

Over the past 5 years we have charted steady improvements in levels of customer satisfaction for most Internet banks. The higher levels of satisfaction have been driven mainly by improved functionality and usability. However, when we interview online banking users and read the comments from our visitor surveys, we are aware that there are still a number of issues that cause irritation and annoyance to users.

Using findings from a continuous survey amongst UK Internet bank customers and additional primary research conducted in December 2004, this paper aims to provide a unique insight into Internet banking in the United Kingdom. The paper reveals consumers' perceptions of Internet banking, how these have changed over time and how they are likely to develop in the future. It offers all those involved in the financial industry a better understanding of what consumers want from Internet banking and suggests the key areas for improvement that will help further grow this important sector of the market.

In recent years there has been a growing reaction to the increasing pace of life. As the world has got smaller, and the speed of life faster, an ever larger number of people have begun to say that there is an alternative. They have began demanding what German protagonists are calling eigenzeit - respect for their own time. Generically, this group are characterised by the term Slow, as in the Slow Food movement (www.slowfood.com). However, Carl Honor, in his book In Praise of Slow, is perhaps more accurate when he concentrates on the term, taken from music, tempo giusto, ie the right speed.

How a modal theory of a user experience can help develop winning websites.

Online research is at long last starting to replace research previously conducted via conventional means in the UK. Indeed some research agencies are targeting Europe for growth of online research in 2003 and are predicting it may reach a share of 15-20% of the market by 2005

This article describes the current state of the online survey market. It particularly highlights the big differences between the US where these techniques have been widely used and Europe where they have not. It discusses the reasons for this divide and the many issues surrounding online panels and website interviewing. It also covers online qualitative methods and suggests that these may never become as mainstream as the quantitative methods (in Europe at least). It reviews areas where online research is likely to make a major impact and discusses potential future developments.

This paper presents a review of web site pop-up surveys. In particular it discusses the response rates (typically 15% - 30%) and the factors that appear to influence them. It also raises a number of issues and problems with pop-up surveys and discusses how they may develop in the future.

This paper summarises the changes that have and are taking place in research agencies around Europe. It describes how agencies have progressed from a Pre-Technology Era through a Basic Technology Era and are now about to go into a Technology Revolution Era. It describes some of the changes that are about to take place in the Technology Era in terms of: external communications, data delivery, fieldwork, internal communications and office efficiency.

The paper examines current and future Internet usage in Europe. It discusses how the Internet is beginning to be used for data collection in market research and its benefits over other methods. More specifically it shows the results of Internet Opinion Polls conducted prior to UK General Election in 1997. Not only did these polls show exactly the same trends on conventional polls during the election period, but they also accurately predicted the final outcome. The results clearly support the likelihood that the Internet will become an established method of data collection of the future.