Sponsor empathetically, Twite adds, will also be to make the best of rapid hypothesis testing: to examine the data, consider a question of interest, but then use automation to put that into the field immediately. In the next iteration of Tolunas platform, clients can script questions and get response data back in real time a process that, perversely, makes the human part of the research process more important. The rush to automate This swing from manual to fully automated, to a hybrid that recognises the shortcomings of each, has also taken place in qual. There was a step change around the 2008 recession, when everyone had their budgets slashed, recalls Jem Fawcus, group CEO at Firefish. All our clients wanted to do more with less, and decided that technology was going to solve all their problems. The moment coincided with the apex of the big data hype cycle, and Firefish, like many agencies, found it was being pressured to replace minds with machines in its qual research. At the time, it was presented as a binary, either/or thing. There were many technology providers with no background in research who were selling their services direct to the client. So we had to adapt pretty fast. The promise of automated mass qual what Fawcus has termed Qual 2.0 was alluring, but the results were often superficial. There was a change in the definition of what was good it used to mean the best quality you could get, the most actionable answer. Now, it often means what we can get in the time and for the budget that Human-centred design One of the most influential making products harder for humans insensitive to change, unimaginative). hi-tech revolution based his thinking machine-centred point of view, early warning that the fad for characteristics (vague, disorganised, much focus on numbers, and too little researchers and designers of the on a profound belief that technology and our minds are complementary. Donald Norman, author of The Design of Everyday Things, and known as the father of user experience, has been vice-president of advanced technology at Apple, the founder of UX research pioneer the Nielsen Norman Group, and a professor at Harvard. In 1997, he was already cautioning against tech fetishism that was 28 to use: According to todays humans would rate all the negative distractible, emotional, illogical), while computers would earn all the positive ones (precise, orderly, At the same time, Norman gave an technology at work was placing too on understanding the information that was being generated. In reporting, he advocated undistractible, unemotional, logical). eliminating or minimising the need however, would assign humans all numerical information, so they are A complementary approach, the positive traits (creative, compliant, attentive to change, resourceful) and computers all the negative ones (dumb, rigid, for people to provide precise free to do higher-level evaluation, to state intentions, to make midcourse corrections, and to reformulate the problem.