Patent ID: 6859784

Claim:
A method for gathering research data comprising: identifying a target website about which research data will be gathered; characterizing the target website including determining a site profile, the site profile including information for characterizing the target website content and usage; automatically selecting questions from a predefined list of questions directed to a research metric based on the site profile; said selecting selects n questions; partitioning the question set into a plurality of m subsets of questions where a subset m of questions includes r i questions and where n=Σ m i=1 r i ; identifying k participants to query; presenting one or more subsets of questions from the question set to at least one of the identified participants without presenting all of the n questions to all of the k participants and without presenting the same questions to each participant, the presenting step including gathering responses from each participant to their respective subset(s) of questions presented for the research metric coincident with a navigation of the target website by a given participant; and combining the participants' responses to produce an index of the research metric; the step of characterizing the target website further includes determining a task to be performed by a participant while navigating the target website; the step of selecting one or more subsets of questions includes selecting questions relevant to the task; and the step of presenting one or more subsets of questions from the question set to at least one of the identified participants includes presenting the one or more subsets of questions to a participant coincident with the navigation of the target website.