Vizbii’s Morphii® Technology is Helping Organizations Better Understand Experiences

Organizations worldwide are spending trillions every year to solve experience problems for their stakeholders (customers, constituents, employees, students, patients, or otherwise), and they’re coming up short. Vizbii Technologies has pioneered its Morphii^® technology to bridge this gap.

Morphii’s patent outlines a technology that allows people to manipulate and control the appearance of proprietary graphical images to self-report on subjective experiences; while, in the background, a continuous scale captures the reported expression (categorical experience) and the significance/intensity of that expression.

For respondents, Morphii improves the feedback experience and drives engagement by facilitating a simple and interactive transaction of authentic information. They do not have to manufacture an artificial rating or find the words to explain how they are feeling. They can just share what they are experiencing and to what degree through morphiis.

Today, morphiis look like emojis, and that’s intentional because of their familiarity as visual representations of emotions and moods (not to mention their popularity as the world’s fastest-growing language). Tomorrow, morphiis might look entirely different and represent other kinds of subjective experiences. Components of taste like saltiness, sweetness, or spiciness are great examples of subjective experiences that Morphii could capture in the future.

There are 3 key takeaways for Morphii enabled platforms. The technology:      

• Improves efficiency for users and analysts,
• Elevates experience data (X-Data) quality by minimizing interpretation and bias, and
• Dramatically increases predictive accuracy by quantifying intensity, a new class of X-Data.

In an interview with the CEO of Vizbii Technologies, Julie Moreland, she explained how Morphii is built to extract qualitative experiences and quantify intensity in order to make AI/ML more efficient and more predictive at a global scale. She also talked about how the innovation by Vizbii is helping companies and much more. Here are the excerpts:

Q. Have you always been passionate about software and technology? Tell us what inspired you to join Vizbii Technologies?

Our founders, angel investors and leadership met rather serendipitously back in 2014. We formed what is now Vizbii Technologies, Inc., intent on turning an idea into a tangible innovation. As a clinical psychologist struggling to extract valuable information from patients using traditional surveys, our founder’s premise for Morphii was always to create a more authentic and efficient means for people to communicate their experiences.

After 25 years of building SaaS-based startups, I was inspired to see our founders’ vision through. Successfully implementing a business model to fuse behavioral science, technology, and predictive analytics would develop and deliver a product that simplifies and informs critical decisions. I saw tremendous potential to fulfill an unmet need around experience data. Each year, organizations spend astronomical amounts to solve experience problems for their stakeholders—and they aren’t getting their money’s worth.

I recruited leaders and developers with proven records in software and SaaS technology to realize our shared vision: a streamlined plug-in widget technology that could be consumed and distributed by high-volume platform companies who collect data and manufacture insights using AI/ML for organizations of all shapes, sizes, colors and stripes – universally. They’re hungry for solutions that improve explanatory and predictive insights by solving data quality challenges around experience.

Q. What are your focus areas? Please share an overview.

Our focus is set on identifying, securing and scaling partnerships with platform technology companies that will plug-in Morphii to leverage X-Data benefits. These buyers are highly sophisticated, with advanced AI/ML models—primed to innovate and iterate.

In general terms, these platforms collect and analyze data to understand different types of stakeholders; but, typically they/we are facilitating:

• Market Research to understand customers and their experiences with brands/products/services/concepts, etc
• User Experience (UX) Research to drive digital experience design
• Patient Experience Research to understand the impacts of affective determinants of health (clinical and non-clinical), and/or
• Community Research, a catch-all for studying the engagement and motivations that drive employees, students, constituents, and other non-consumer populations

How do you keep abreast with the increasing competition in this massive industry?

The topic of competition is an interesting one for us for a few reasons, and it requires keeping tabs on what’s working for platforms and what isn’t.

Our most basic “competition” comes in the form of free-to-use methodologies, like Likert Scales or Word Choice/Association. Sentiment scales roughly define positive, negative or neutral respondent attitudes, whereas word choice can categorize experiences with more nuance. But then what? How much can that forced-choice tell you about a respondent’s motivations? Neither is particularly engaging, nor do they feel very genuine; so, you end up with a lot of “gray area” responses that are difficult to action with any confidence.

Filling in these gray areas requires context. Most platforms have invested in technologies that extract and interpret information from open feedback collected through traditional surveys, phone and video interactions,  online forums, etc. Providing this information is what we call a “labor of love ... or hate,” meaning that most feedback is coming from individuals whose experiences are extreme; but, not typically those in the majority, whose improved experiences would be most impactful.

The most advanced technologies in this space use a variety of biometrics to observe and infer aspects of experiences by detecting relevant changes in things like facial expressions, eye movement, heart rate, and so on. These methods are pretty invasive, and their ability to accurately train machines and efficiently drive artificial intelligence around experience remains relatively unproven despite heavy investment.

For platforms, it’s difficult to differentiate from their competitors because their data collection methods don’t tend to vary. It then becomes what they can do with the data they collect.

All of these methods require a substantial amount of confidence in any given model’s ability to interpret X-Data, whether it is overtly and actively provided by a respondent, or covertly detected from a passive informant. That’s where Morphii really stands apart. It allows respondents to actively and authentically self-report in a way that reduces reliance on interpretation, while also helping predictive models improve accuracy—regardless of whether an experience was positive, negative, or somewhere in between.

Today, Morphii is a better way to capture X-Data and train machines around human experiences. Tomorrow, it may help validate passive/detected biometric data—paving the way to more reliable and actionable insights.

Q. How has your product development strategy impacted your success?

We spent three years building the technology and infrastructure to maximize agility and versatility so that any company could easily use our widget within the platform(s) of their choice. Whenever a platform plugs in Morphii, we are primed for explosive growth. The market drove our development, resulting in over 30 morphiis to capture relevant constructs in experience research, from Delight-to-Disgust and Confusion-to-Comfort.

We really started to leverage what we built in 2019; and, in spite of the pandemic, 2020 was our best year yet. Organizations, more than ever, needed solutions to efficiently understand stakeholders when traditional communication channels broke down. So far, we are seeing similar growth in 2021 (>30% y/o/y). It feels uncomfortable to celebrate this accomplishment, while so many businesses are struggling, but we are encouraged to know that we are playing a role in helping many weather the storm.

Q. How do you ensure a culture of integrity and innovation at Vizbii? And tell us what inspires you and your employees to innovate?

When you’re in the business of improving data quality, there’s nothing more important than your integrity. Our team understood this from day one. Whether we were validating morphii designs or pitching new clients, it’s been imperative that we ask ourselves: Is Morphii the right tool to solve this problem? Are we making it easier to communicate and be understood? Are we facilitating more empathetic AI? This makes it easy to get behind our business model, because it’s good for everybody.

The Visionary

Julie Moreland, CEO: Julie has dedicated a majority of her career to building SaaS-based companies. She finds pivotal moments within a market, assembles the perfect team, and gets to work. An experienced entrepreneur with five start-ups under her belt, she delivered her most recent successful exit in 2013.

Get in touch - www.morphii.com