GMI Research Analyzer 2.0 Reviewed

Tim Macer takes a look at the latest incarnation of the desktop and charting solution

Market research, like nature, abhors a vacuum. The decision by the current owners of Quanvert, the industry’s most widely used desktop analysis software, to cease active development has encouraged a rush of alternatives into the market to fill this particular void. The latest is from GMI, who, like SPSS, has filled out its research software portfolio through company acquisition. Sensibly, GMI has decided to take one of the jewels of the MI Pro portfolio, its analytical suite, and give it a life of its own as the new Research Analyzer (or ‘RA’). Sensible because, though GMI is known for its online offerings such as its panel and its multi-modal Net-MR suite, using a desktop application to analyse data, rather than a web-based one, offers a lot of advantages. There is often a small delay or ‘latency’ inherent in the business of refreshing the content of web pages across the internet which tends to make web-based analytical software often feel sluggish to the regular user, especially if there is any network congestion. Stick to locally installed software, as in the case of RA, and zippy performance is guaranteed,

Web-based data analysis does offer several advantages though, which Quanvert users have always been denied, such always working on the latest data on the web server, rather than having to obtain it and download it. RA fully embraces the internet with its built-in ‘Online Services’ feature. Provided you have a live internet connection, a panel at the bottom of the opening screen gives you access to live updates to project files, to messages and to software updates too. The messages can be used by your data provider to alert you to the availability of new data or anything they choose to share with you. Clicking the button to update projects will fetch any new data on the server and place it on your local disk. So you can carry on working on the train, the plane or at home without a live internet link. Yet file distribution has shifted from the old CD ROM or email push to an elegant on-demand pull by the user.

As an analysis tool, it is pleasing to use, easy to navigate and with a very good range of functionality. You follow a logical flow from your list of projects into selecting a project and then into the main analysis tool. On the way, you have a folder in which you can store outputs created in RA and any other project documents. In the main RA window, tables are built up by dragging and dropping from a list of questions. It is a serious-looking tool, with few icons and a lot of grey and blue, giving it a surprisingly dated feel. But the workflow through building and executing tables is simple and intuitive, as are options to add refinements such as different percentages, statistics, filters and so on. It also features a well laid-out topline view, but presentation options regarding look-and-feel are very limited, and require expert programming help to achieve.

The program goes the extra mile with options to group question categories together and add in nets and subnets. You can change the text of questions, but in most cases, the labels for answers are unavailable for change, and all of these options only affect the table you are working on. You cannot change the questions, or create dummy variables, so adding a brand category net to a series of questions could become extremely monotonous. It really needs a capability to make systematic changes to questions once created - especially as all your tables can be saved as a ‘script’ for later execution - which you can even edit with care. But the scripting options sit at odds with the rest of the drag-and-drop approach, and you could easily come unstuck at this point, as scripts are only identified by the file name you choose to give them.

RA lets you build tables and charts conventionally within the program, and export these as Excel workbooks or in HTML or PDF formats, for circulation, or you can go one better by using their special link to the MI Pro Live Table feature, which builds the tables in Excel in a way that will allows users to continue to make changes and modifications. While others attempt to do this with Excel Pivot Tables, which are totally baffling to most users, MI Pro Live Tables actually do sensible things. They let you change options, make selections and generate charts selection and generate charts in a friendly and accessible way, without end-users needing their own RA licences, or access to raw data.

At this stage, the documentation is virtually non existent, beyond a quick-start guide covering what any competent user could figure out for him- or herself, so many of the really advanced features. Though the program has graduated to version 2, overall, it still has the feel of a first version to me, but with definite potential to develop into an extremely agile analysis tool.

Country Report: Norway. Synovate in Research Analyzer

Kathrine Andersen is a senior research executive at Synovate MMI in Norway and uses Research Analyser to produce charts to present findings from ad hoc surveys. She finds those in Research Analyzer to be particularly amenable to presenting cross-tabular results visually. Katherine reports:

‘There is a group of four of us here using it. I like not just to show the total results but also to be able to compare men and women, and so on. It saves me having to enter all the numbers in again so it is more productive going from the analysis to the graphics as you miss out a step. I do have to do some editing when I am in PowerPoint, but even so this still saves me time. I like the idea of having to get it straight into PowerPoint. If you have a lot of grid tables with a lot of alternatives, it can save you a lot of time.

“It does not take a long time to long time to learn. It is all menu based and right-click based, so whenever you right-click you get all the options you need; you drag and drop the questions from the questionnaire frame to the graphics or tables frame.”

“I could see clients could have this on their desktops, if they just wanted us to collect the data, and they could have this system to do the reporting themselves. I work with many research departments, some of whom just want the data, and this would help them to create the graphics they want quickly. Also, I know when people do surveys and report by standard targets, they often have other questions they want you to explore two or three weeks later to explore. If they had this they would be able to do that for themselves – it would be good for that.”

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