In the latest update to The HiVE we’re introducing new image capabilities within the Form tool that will help you engage in more visual ways.

Traditional surveys can be boring, often failing to connect with the end user or even failing to inspire people to participate at all. This means the data you collect is often unrepresentative of the wider community, and can reinforce biases from certain demographic or special interest groups.

As part of our ongoing vision to deliver engaging and dynamic surveys, we’ve introduced several new features that help you create more attractive, visual surveys and to reduce bias in the questions you ask.

We've added the ability to add images to multiple choice question responses. This lets you illustrate your questions with attractive images, bringing them to life and adding a new dimension to your surveys.

Users can now add images to each multiple choice question response and choose the size that images will display at (‘small’, ‘medium’ and ‘large’). The questions are optimised for images with a 4:3 aspect ratio, so if you want the results to look professional we recommend you crop your images before uploading them.

If you don’t have the software to do this, we recommend using FIE, Be Funky or Fotr.

This feature will help you improve the user experience of your surveys, and also unlock new research new capabilities and methods such as visual preference surveys.

We’ve added a new element in the Form tool called ‘Content Screen’ which will lets you insert text and image content into your surveys. You can use this element to provide important information to people while they take a survey, providing a more educational two-way experience.

While it has previously been possible to add headings, text and image elements individually to the Form tool, this presented an issue when using the ‘Flow’ template as each element is rendered as a single screen making it impossible to add an image and text together.

Now these elements can be combined into a single screen within the Flow template.

As part of the release we’ve also introduced the ability to randomise your question choices to reduce potential bias in the results.

This option can be enabled for Multiple Choice, Select Box and Ranking questions types, and will shuffle the order response choices appear when the survey is loaded.

Randomisation is suitable when there is no logic to the order of your question responses. It reduces the bias that can occur when users simply click the first choice in a list (which research tells us is common.) This can be especially useful when paired with the new image-based questions, as this bias effect can be further exacerbated when images are used.

This feature helps you implement more robust research methods in your engagements and is part of our commitment to improving the integrity of the data collection process.