Best practices for designing Experience Sampling Method (ESM) & Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA) Studies for Smartphones Devices. ESM & EMA fit nicely into the realm of mobile and smartphone research. The ubiquity of these devices means that participants can be prompted in-the-moment, and not after the experience has passed. MetricWire is the world’s most advanced data collection and analysis platform for smartphone research. We offer smartphone technology for Experience Sampling and Ecological Momentary Assessment that cannot be matched. To learn more about our technology check out our website: https://metricwire.com/

1. 5 Tips
Best practices for designing Experience Sampling Method (ESM) &
Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA) Studies for Smartphones.
For Smartphone
ESM/EMA

2. What is
ESM & EMA?

3. Experience Sampling
Method (ESM) &
Ecological
Momentary
Assessment (EMA)
• Share a need to poll
participants in-the-moment
or at the time of experience
• This provides researchers
with higher quality and
more valid data that is not
subject to recall or
reconstruction bias.

4. Why
Smartphones?

5. Smartphones are Ubiquitous
 Pen, paper & pre-
programmed pagers are out
of date
 Smartphone applications
like MetricWire are perfect
for in-the-moment insights
 Smartphones are with us
constantly
 Leverage the onboard
sensors & technology

6. Tip #1
Reduce the Amount of
Questions in Your Surveys

7. Efficiency is Key
 Long surveys on mobile are intrusive
 Mobile users are used to fast, refined
motions
 Consider breaking a long survey into
multiple surveys pushed at different
times
 Lessen the burden of lengthy surveys
and decrease satisficing (selecting the
quickest route to the end of the
survey)

8. People use their smartphones for quick,
engaging actions. Do not lose their
interest with a 100 question survey on a
small screen!
Remember

9. Tip #2
Space Your Prompts Wisely

10. Engagement vs. Annoyance
 It is a good idea to space
prompts/interventions where they
become part of your participants’
daily habits
 Too many prompts can become an
intrusion
 There is a fine line between a study
that engages participants and one
that annoys them

11.  MetricWire has many different trigger types that
allow you to customize when and where your
participants receive notifications.
 The Random Trigger option is helpful in running
ESM & EMA studies.

12. Tip #3
Choose Optimal Question Types

13. Optimization
 Depending on the question set,
optimize your survey by choosing the
most efficient question types
 Likert-style sliding scales for
experience rating questions can help
facilitate the speed of the survey and
reduce intervention time

14.  The sliding scale creates distance between two polar
points, allowing your participants to slide through the
choices easily, rather than scrolling through a list of
single-select questions, check-boxes, or vaguely
inputting open-ended text

15. Tip #4
Test Your Study Before Deploying

16. Progress Not Perfection
 Your study may look perfect during
setup, but it still might not work the
way you want it to
 It is a good practice to test how your
app is going to function under the
conditions that you’ve programmed

17.  By doing a trial
run, you can
work out many
of the kinks that
could hinder data
collection, and
lessen the
amount of time
you spend
dealing with
issues.

18. Tip #5
Change Variables That Don’t Work

19. Data-Driven Decisions
 Real-time data means that you can
actively track your participants in-the-
moment
 Managing prompts in real-time allows
you to make alterations to your study
or prompts without having to restart
or rebuild the study
 This is an added bonus to evaluate
how well your study is working

20.  We can see by these survey statistics, that although there are 7
participants invited, it seems as though only 2 have responded, and
looks as though one of them has dropped out
 There are also 34 triggers that have fired, yet only 5 surveys have
actually been completed
 This leads us to believe that some part of the survey may be inefficient
for participants to finish, and needs to be altered immediately

21. Conclusions
 Reduce the Amount of Questions in
Your Surveys
 Space Your Prompts Wisely
 Choose Optimal Question Types
 Test Your Study Before Deploying
 Change Variables That Don’t Work

23. MetricWire is the world’s most advanced data collection and analysis platform for
smartphone research. We offer smartphone technology for Experience Sampling and
Ecological Momentary Assessment that cannot be matched. To learn more about
our technology check out our website:
www.metricwire.com
Check out our blog to read more about more about smartphone research methods
and the researchers who are doing amazing things with the MetricWire platform.
www.metricwire.com/ blog
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send us a message today and we’ll get back to you ASAP
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