UIEtips article: Avoiding Demographics When Recruiting Participants
July 2nd, 2008
User research is now a critical tool in the toolbox of design teams. However, it only works well if you involve the right participants in the study.
Having the participants that match the design’s audience will give the team feedback on what works well and where the design needs rethinking. By learning from the participants, the team can make informed design decisions on all aspects of the user’s experience.
However, having test participants who don’t match the audience can be very problematic. The team may miss learning about critical problems while they spend valuable time and resources fixing design issues that aren’t really important in real use.
In today’s issue of UIE’s email newsletter, UIEtips, I have the opportunity to interview the talented, Dana Chisnell, whose new book, The Handbook of Usability Testing, which she co-wrote with Jeff Rubin, has just been published. We talk about what happens when teams try to use market research demographics as the basis for recruiting their participants and what the alternatives are.
Read my interview with Dana Chisnell, Avoiding Demographics When Recruiting Participants.
If you are looking to get the most out of your usability testing, you’ll want to attend Dana’s full-day seminar, Usability Testing Guerilla Techniques: Collecting User Data on a Shoestring, at the User Interface Conference in October. Dana will show you how to get the most out of usability testing with a limited budget.
Have you struggled with recruiting participants for user research studies? We’d love to hear your thoughts below.
July 3rd, 2008 at 4:39 am
Still to read the article but a quick comment while I am waiting to check into our hotel in Shanghai
I am often perplexed as to why when “user profiles” are developed they often include “marget segments” or variables that the client hopes will magically come out of the research and have little to do with real behaviors or actual interactions with a product or service. Its seems segments are more about people they aim to sell to and not what users are actually doing.
I understand the need to find the right people for research, but often there is too much reliance on finding precisely the right person to map into a segment, when the segments themselves are cold, removed and not based on fact. *sips tea*