Ekas

My role

Lead UX/UI Designer

Duration

3 months

Team

Myself, The Director of Innovation, Lead Engineer, Researchers and Analysts

Overview

Working along side the Director of Innovation, Lead Engineer and the Research and Insights Team, my role was to design a series of survey types with various ‘skins’ that would be used both in direct engagement and a passive public context. The objective was to make the surveys engaging and consistent between themes, while adhering to brand.

The challenge

In my role at Ekas Market Research I dealt with a lot of data, and this data came from respondents. Often, recruiting respondents can be a struggle. Getting prospective respondents to engage with the survey or screener, finish it, and answer truthfully is an ongoing challenge for any organisation utilising standard market research methods.

My objective was to increase respondent engagement and create a cohesive and scalable style guide for the company's survey suite and new market research technologies.

Problem statment

How might we make our surveys and screeners more engaging?

The process

Kick off and Discovery

I utilised a few different methods to help understand respondent and stakeholder painpoints.

Stakeholder interviews
Large scale quantitative survey (300 responses)
Interviews (30 respondents)
Qual and quant investigations into current respondent behaviours

Some things I discovered:

1. Respondent Engagement Challenges

Many respondents found surveys tedious or repetitive, leading to disengagement before completion.
Drop-off rates were higher for longer surveys, particularly if they lacked visual engagement or interactive elements.
Some respondents reported frustration with poorly optimised mobile experiences.

2. Cognitive Load and Survey Fatigue

Respondents struggled with dense question formatting, indicating that clearer structure and more intuitive navigation could improve response quality.
Surveys with complex language or excessive jargon negatively impacted engagement, particularly among certain demographics.

3. User Preferences and Behavior Patterns

Respondents preferred surveys that felt more interactive and personalised, indicating better retention would be observed if surveys used progress indicators or gamified elements.
A portion of users enjoyed visual and multimedia elements in surveys, though this depended on the demographic.

4. Stakeholder Concerns and Needs

Stakeholders emphasised the need for better data quality and reduced respondent drop-off rates.
They were interested in balancing engagement improvements with maintaining methodological rigor in data collection.
Consistency across surveys was identified as a key issue, with different teams using varied survey styles that led to inconsistent data sets.

5. Technical and Accessibility Issues

Some respondents faced difficulties with certain survey platforms, particularly on mobile devices.
Accessibility gaps were identified, such as poor contrast, lack of assistive technology support, and formatting issues that affected usability.

Strategy

Drawing on feedback from staff and customers, I began conducting an analysis of market competitors and research articles on driving user engagement on digital platforms.
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Throughout this research, and with the support of the business, gamification became a focus, exploring models used in online forms, market research, recreational gaming, and user interfaces.
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The results were codified against gestalt, heuristic, cognitive bias, and UX design principles to create a succinct set of instructions to follow throughout subsequent design processes.

Gamification Principles Applied

To drive engagement, we used a combination gamification techniques like feedback loops, visual metaphors, and progress indicators. These created a sense of control, clarity, and reward. These madeinteractions feel intuitive, responsive, and worth completing.

1. Progression Systems

Example: A progress bar or level indicator that fills up as users complete tasks or sections.

‍Purpose: Provides a sense of advancement and encourages users to continue.

2. Feedback Loops

Example: When a user drags an item, a message or animation appears confirming the action or providing insight.

Purpose: Immediate responses reinforce user actions and help guide behavior.

3. Meaningful Choice

Example: Letting users rank or place items based on personal preference rather than selecting from fixed options.
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Purpose: Increases engagement by giving users agency and control.

4. Personalisation / Ownership

Example: Users project their own experiences onto a scale or quadrant by placing items subjectively.

Purpose: Creating an interface that adapts to user input (rather than dictating it) increases emotional investment.

5. Visual Metaphor

Example: Concentric circles act as a soft heatmap or radar-style tool for indicating “how much” and “how useful.”

Purpose: Abstract data collection is turned into a more intuitive, game-like mapping experience.

6. Cognitive Anchoring

Example: Structuring an interface with labeled axes or zones (e.g. “fun vs useful”) to guide how users interpret and place items.

Purpose: Reduces cognitive load and increases confidence in decision-making.

7. Fiero (Micro)

Example: Subtle but present when users complete a section and see the progress bar tick forward.
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Purpose: That sense of "done!" creates a micro-burst of satisfaction, motivating them to keep going.

8. Completion Bias

Example: Make the interaction feel like a small puzzle. Users tend to want to finish the task.

Purpose: Drives task completion by nudging users to 'complete the set.'

Ideation

With the director, developers, researchers, and analysts I ran workshops to quickly generate some ideas and get consensus on some constitutive elements for the surveys.

Click to expand.

Wireframes were delivered for feedback from these stakeholders and altered to deliver viable and feasible low-fidelity mock-ups.

Together we agreed upon 3 survey types that would be prototyped, tested and developed for initial phases of the project.

Prototyping and testing

Click to expand.

I worked together with our lead developer, researchers and analysts to produce functional, coded prototypes that would not only be used to test the interfaces, but also the usability of the data obtained from the surveys.

As a small, focused team, this approach enabled us to move at speed and iteratively work towards a functional system that would then be used as the final product.

Unifying the style

Utilising insights gained from user testing, I defined a set of design principles and assets to apply to our first three survey types and guide the design of subsequent surveys.

The outcome

Although I left before the new surveys were fully rolled out, live testing showed a promising 2.2-point lift in customer engagement on a 5-point scale developed by the Research and Insights team which combined user engagement, survey completion, and data validity metrics.
Combined with efficiency gains from the upgraded data analysis systems, the work effectively doubled the organisation’s research capacity and revenue potential in the survey space.

The project also laid the groundwork for integration with a new patented hardware product, designed to unlock a completely new revenue stream. The business case projected multi-million dollar revenue potential within five years of bringing the hardware to market.

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