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• iPhone’s first real research app by Dan Rockwell on July 18, 2008

  Like most iPhone owners, I spent some time last weekend playing with Apple’s new App Store, part of the iPhone 2.0 release. There are games, social networking tools, audio recorders, radio stations, painting apps, you name it. As one of the data-capturing audio/video geeks at Lextant, I’m always on the hunt for yet another tool for my research tool box. I try to make sure that where ever we go, we’re able to capture those critical moments with our research participants. 

  It’s more challenging than you may think.  We often have just one chance to get the essence — the essential data McNugget (as my brother Chris likes to call it) — of a participant’s emotions and experiences that prove to be a critical insight to the research program. Some people call this data capture, but for me, I think of it as the art of capturing moments. 

  Researchers have plenty of tools at their disposal, from the almighty Moleskine notebook to digital video and savvy custom note-taking applications.  Every project brings yet another scenario to the table where I wonder, “hmmm how can we best capture these moments...?” Over the years we’ve developed a whole suite of custom tools and fancy video-capture rigs. My latest addition to our bag of tricks? A modest applet for the iPhone that costs just $9.99.

  

  TalkingPics allows you to take a picture and audio annotate it on your iPhone.  Big frickin’ deal, eh?  Well, yes, actually it is. There’s no other app on the iPhone that does this, and more importantly, it’s not as cumbersome as traditional audio and video capture methods. It’s a great way to capture what the participant is talking about, and then provide additional context to that image — what’s right or wrong about a product; what needs attention in a store; etc. Simply take a picture, and then record an audio snippet describing it. 

  You could do this with a video or still camera, but those mediums are still a bit too barbaric — they’re simply not as flexible as a cell phone, in my opinion.  A devil’s advocate might say “just capture it all on video,” and yes, you could do that. But then you have to relive the entire experience to find the meaningful commentary.  Capturing video without time-codes is what I call “brute force;” sure, you’ll capture the whole day, but unless you know which events happened where with what insight, you really have no choice but to watch the entire experience again, simply to find a nugget or two of truth. It’s an easy way to burn through budget. You can definitely do that, and I can tell you everyone in research does, but its often not as surgically percise as I’d like these methods to be. 

  With TalkingPics, I can stroll right up there, take that picture, talk myself or have the participant tell me why a certain design element is critical, all with the convenience of a cell phone experience.  This won’t replace video or still cameras, but it will provide another layer to look at.  As an added bonus, TalkingPics also lets you audio annotate locations on a map, which makes it easy to connect who said what where. TalkingPics is another welcome addition to the Lextant toolbox. 

  Note: At the moment, TalkingPics doesn’t allow you to export your image annotations to the web or PC, but Andrew Stone, developer of TalkingPics, assures me this feature will be in the next release of the app. Watch for it in an iPhone App Store near you.

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