Key benefits of attribute prioritization studies:

• Clarity: Understand which features or characteristics matter most to your customers.
• Efficiency: Focus limited development or marketing resources on high-impact areas.
• Customer-Centricity: Align innovation, messaging, and design with what customers truly want.
• Internal Alignment: Build buy-in across teams by grounding decisions in clear, prioritized data.

Where attribute prioritization adds value:

Attribute prioritization is valuable during many stages of product development or brand strategy, including:

• Exploring what features to include in a minimum viable product (MVP)
• Determining messaging hierarchies for marketing campaigns
• Choosing what benefits to emphasize for brand positioning
• Testing value propositions for pricing strategies

What makes it "multi-level"?

In some cases, it helps to organize features, benefits, or attributes into logical categories – like functionality, emotional appeal, sustainability, or convenience – and then test preference both within and across these levels. That’s a multi-level prioritization study: you may first identify the most important category, and then drill deeper to find the top features inside that category.

For example, a fictional snack brand could structure a study like this:

• Level 1: Identify which attribute category customers care about most – taste, health benefits, packaging, or availability
• Level 2: Within the top category (e.g., health benefits), rank attributes like “low sugar,” “plant-based,” “high protein,” etc.

Why use Prolific for market research studies like MaxDiff?

Prolific is a fast-growing consumer research platform used by both academic researchers and businesses to recruit quality respondents quickly. Its broad participant base and targeting features make it ideal for prioritization research – especially when budget is a factor and speed is important.

Prolific for market research studies is especially valuable because it allows:

• Access to diverse and engaged participant panels globally
• Detailed demographic and behavioral targeting
• Fair compensation standards and higher data quality

MaxDiff, or Maximum Difference Scaling, is a proven prioritization method that uncovers customer preferences by asking them to choose the most and least important items from a set. It works especially well for product feature testing and customer attribute ranking where you want to understand not just what users like, but how much they prefer one attribute over another.

When designing a MaxDiff-style study on a consumer research platform like Prolific, it’s important to keep your research goals in focus and structure the questions to maximize clarity and data utility.

Steps to Set Up a MaxDiff-Style Study on Prolific

1. Define your attributes clearly. Start by identifying and listing the features, messages, or benefits you want to test. These could be anything from pricing options to product functionalities—anything where preferences matter.

2. Group attributes into balanced sets. In MaxDiff, participants are shown subsets of attributes and asked to select the most and least important from each set. It's important to randomize and balance the sets so each item is shown an equal number of times across respondents.

3. Use survey design tools for logic and randomization. Platforms like Qualtrics or SurveyMonkey can be used in combination with Prolific to execute your survey logic. Prolific is your research recruitment tool, while survey platforms manage the respondent experience.

4. Upload your survey to Prolific. Once your MaxDiff survey is ready, create your study on Prolific and specify audience filters like location, demographics, usage behaviors, or custom screeners to ensure relevant participants.

5. Run a soft launch. Before going full scale, test your MaxDiff study with a small group to check for comprehension and response time. Make any adjustments and then proceed with full data collection.

Example: Prioritizing App Features for a FinTech Startup

For instance, a fictional FinTech startup might run a MaxDiff-style survey on Prolific to test which features—instant transfers, budgeting tools, crypto wallet, in-app support—matter most to Gen Z users. By asking these users to choose the most and least valuable from small randomized sets, the brand can build a clear, quantifiable hierarchy of feature preferences.

This detailed ranking gives businesses not just data, but clarity in decision-making—especially when pursuing rapid product development or needing clear go/no-go indicators.

Prolific has become a popular DIY research tool thanks to its diverse, pre-screened participant pool and fast turnaround times. But to get the most from your investment, especially when conducting a complex prioritization study like MaxDiff, it’s important to take steps that ensure high-quality responses.

Key Strategies to Improve Research Recruitment and Data Integrity

Design surveys with clarity. Keep questions simple, instructions explicit, and visual layout clean. Especially in prioritization studies, unclear definitions or overloaded sets can confuse participants and muddle results.

Program attention checks that don’t interrupt flow. Strategically designed quality control questions can catch disengaged users without drawing attention to them. Avoid making them too tricky—think simple logic traps or obvious choices that indicate they're reading carefully.

Leverage Prolific's pre-screening filters. Prolific lets you pre-select participants based on demographics, behaviors, or custom screeners. Use these tools to ensure your respondents actually match your target audience. For instance, if you're doing product feature testing for a new skincare brand, you might filter for age, gender, skincare spend, and purchase habits.

Communicate expected time honestly. Estimate how long the survey will take and match that with realistic compensation. Participants who feel fairly compensated for their time are far more likely to engage thoughtfully.

• Soft launch your study with 10–20 participants first to verify behavior and validate timing.
• Use timers or page logic to detect bots or speeders.
• Encourage honest, thoughtful input without forcing open-ended overload.

Review data in real-time. Prolific makes it easy to watch as data comes in. Reviewing early responses can help spot issues with question clarity or inattentiveness before completing full fielding.

These practical tips help ensure your customer attribute ranking is based on clean, trustworthy data—so you can make better business decisions with confidence.

While platforms like Prolific make it easier than ever to run your own studies, designing a high-quality prioritization study still demands expertise. Whether it's setting up multi-level MaxDiff logic, crafting the right attribute statements, or interpreting results to drive business strategy—these tasks require more than just access to tools.

This is where SIVO’s On Demand Talent makes a real difference.

Bridging Skill Gaps Without the Overhead

Our network of seasoned insights professionals can supplement your team on a fractional basis—exactly when and where you need them. Unlike freelancers or short-term consultants, On Demand Talent brings not only deep experience across consumer research platforms like Prolific, but also the strategic mindset to design studies that align with your business goals.

Whether you're new to MaxDiff or managing high-stakes research deadlines, On Demand Talent can help you:

• Design clear, focused attribute prioritization studies that avoid bias and confusion
• Configure survey platforms correctly to capture layered prioritization data
• Optimize research recruitment on Prolific to target the right audiences
• Interpret outputs from MaxDiff analysis into actionable insights
• Build long-term research capabilities into your team via knowledge sharing

With the rise of DIY research tools and AI-powered survey design, more teams are experimenting with in-house insights. But saving time shouldn't mean sacrificing quality. On Demand Talent helps balance both—accelerating your output while enhancing rigor in execution.

And unlike permanent hires or traditional research agencies, SIVO’s flexible staffing model gives you the ability to scale up or down as needs evolve, keeping budgets tight and productivity high.

Think of On Demand Talent not as a replacement, but as a multiplier—expanding your in-house team's ability to do better work, faster, and with fewer missteps.