Google knows that a major selling point of its DIY research tool, Google Consumer Surveys #gsurveys, is speed: fast turnaround, fast answers.

But even Google probably did not imagine that DIY researchers would be fielding their research before they had even finished writing their questions. Take the case of Lumosity, a company that claims to help your attention span, improve your concentration, and wants to sell you “brain training.” Here is one of Lumosity’s questions, now in rotation on Google Consumer Surveys:

OK, you say: honest mistake, easy to make. The guys in Lumosity’s research department were developing a list of different places the company had tried advertising, and the research guys were waiting for the marketing guys to perfect the list, when lo and behold, somebody pulled the trigger and published the survey.

Yes, that would be excusable if it happened just once. But how about an entire, big, bloated piece of market research that was launched before anybody had taken even one minute to have read the questions?

And this from a company that helps you concentrate? This from a company that improves your attention span?

Naturally, all of the data that came back from this DIY research undertaking was worthless. Suggestion: when in doubt, hire a professional researcher to help you conduct research about your firm. A good professional researcher will never try to sell you more expertise than you need, will never try to up-sell you to something beyond your means. But a professional researcher will help make sure that what research dollars you do have are not thrown away.

Last, before we leave this particular research undertaking alone, Lumosity would like to know which of these two illegible logos you prefer?

Can you “make out” that the colored pixels are a cortex? We could not, until we looked up the company on Google and saw what business they are in. No decision on a new logo should be made based upon the results of this side-by-side image question. As we have noted on several occasions, Google Consumer Surveys shows images too small to be legible.