Virtualisation Of Structured Projective Mapping Technique Via Mobile App – Early Experiences

Structured projective mapping (PM) is a form of conventional projective mapping approach. This technique uses square or rectangular space and line scales, where with two axes worded as antonyms (typically using adjectives). The underlying concept behind PM is two-dimensional sorting procedure. Together with other variants of projective mapping (unstructured PM and different forms of Napping®), this approach is common in sensory studies, mainly for food products (dis)similarity assessments by trained judges or typical consumers. Although mentioned techniques with quite sophisticated data analysis proposals are well developed, there exist also a simple approach to use structured PM during qualitative interviews in consumer research as a typical projective technique, used to compare objects such product categories, brands. Such task is typically performed individually, on a paper sheet with described axes and objects positioned by study subjects with stick-on labels or logos/other images glued to the sheet. Such procedure is perceived as funny by participants (with typical comments: “return to kindergarten”), but recently many subjects (regardless age) reported the difficulties in performing manual tasks, making the completion time longer and leading to high differences in task completion in group settings. From researcher side manual transfer of coordinates of placed objects for further analysis is a serious drawback. Taking such drawbacks into account, including virtualisation tendencies, as well as permanent usage of mobile devices, an idea of virtualisation of selected types of projective mapping tasks via mobile app appeared. The structured PM was selected as a prototype, to check the viability of replacing traditional paper-and-glue PM with PM performed on a mobile device with a touchscreen. The written app prototype served for test purposes. The Authors intend to make the app available for researchers after further development. Paper describes experiences gathered from tests performed via PM generated by Author’s app, including a comparison of results with a paper-based approach. Participants and researchers opinions are favouring using the app so far, as quicker, more convenient and modern. Analysis proposals are also pointed out with, centroid approach for data aggregation as well as bootstrap based average coordinates and confidence ellipses for particular objects on the map.