Notes from the team
On survey infrastructure, market research tooling, and what we are building. New posts as we have something worth saying.
AI-assisted survey programming: what the AI is actually good at (and what it isn't)
What we learned shipping AI-assisted survey programming: the AI is good at first drafts, bad at staying in scope — and the fixes are structural, not prompts.
CBC vs MaxDiff — when to use which
Choice-based conjoint and MaxDiff look similar on the surface, but they answer different questions. Here's the plain-English difference, the three cases where each one wins, and a decision rule you can use on your next brief.
Qualtrics or Decipher Alternative: A Research Programmer's Checklist (2026)
A practical 2026 checklist for evaluating a Qualtrics or Decipher alternative — side-by-side feature tables, real pricing ranges, the seven things to look at before switching, how to test a platform in an afternoon, and the honest reasons most migrations stall halfway.
Analysis-ready survey exports: solving the column-naming problem
Most survey exports arrive with column names that break SPSS, break joins across waves, and force manual renaming. Here's why it happens, what a column-naming contract looks like, and how to fix it at the platform level.
Why survey quotas fail under concurrent traffic (and how to fix it)
Most survey platforms silently over-quota under heavy concurrent traffic. Here's the race condition that causes it, why 'soft counting' can't fix it, and what an actually-holding quota system looks like.