Nielsen Norman Group - 233 Tips and Tricks for Recruiting Users as Participants in Usability Studies
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Abstract: Participant recruiting for usability studies is the unglamorous foundation for all user testing. Having a systematic recruiting program in place will make a huge difference in the amount of usability testing conducted in your organization and the quality of your recruits with an immediate impact on the quality of the test results. This report from the Nielsen Norman Group tells you how to set up and manage a recruiting program, how to get the right users for specific tests, and how to deal with the users you have recruited. It also presents advice on when to outsource to a recruiting agency (for a fee) and when to use in-house recruiting
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Buy your own copy from: http://www.nngroup.com/reports/tips/recruiting
By now, most companies accept the need to improve the usability of their websites, intranets, software designs, hardware designs, and other projects that have a user interface. Many companies also know that user testing is the simplest and fastest method in the usability engineering toolbox. (Unfortunately, many dont know about the other methods in the toolbox or how to combine multiple usability methods throughout the project lifecycle, but thats a story for another day.)
Lots of people believe in user testing, but not much testing takes place in real design projects. Whats the cause of this discrepancy? Mainly, it is the barrier to firing off a quick, small test whenever people are faced with a design decision. Very few companies are positioned to make a test happen within the deadlines needed for a fast-moving development project. This lack of test-readiness means that testing becomes a rare and precious event thatat besthappens once in each project.
Single-test projects invariably defer their usability testing until the complete design has become available. This practice still occurs despite twenty years of experience uniformly showing that multiple rounds of testing and redesign are necessary to achieve acceptable quality of the user experience and the equally strong finding that it is a hundred times cheaper to fix usability problems if they are discovered in the beginning of a project instead of at the end.
To increase the proportion of companies that apply usability methods correctly, we must make it easier and cheaper to do the right thing.
The three main rules for simplified user testing are:
Get representative users
Ask them to perform representative tasks with the design
Shut up and let the users do the talking.
The third rule is surprisingly difficult, and rule #2 also requires some amount of experience to execute well. Still, the main obstacle to quick and frequent user testing is the difficulty of finding warm bodies that satisfy rule #1. Most companies have no procedures for getting five users to show up at specified times next Wednesday, and yet thats what is required for a successful usability study.
Participant recruiting is the unglamorous foundation for all user testing. Without recruiting you wont have any users to participate in your test. Having a systematic recruiting program in place will make a huge difference in the amount of usability testing conducted in your organization, and increasing the quality of your recruiting will have an immediate impact on the quality of the test results.
To assess the current state of recruiting usability study participants, Nielsen Norman Group conducted a survey of 201 usability professionals. Because we wanted to report how recruiting actually takes place in todays design projects, we deliberately surveyed a biased sample of respondents who were actively involved in usability testing and recruiting. Of course, because most companies dont currently conduct user testing, they also dont recruit test participants. The findings reported here relate solely to the practices of companies that do usability testing.
Of survey respondents, 54% were based in the United States, 8% were in the UK, 7% in Canada, and 5% in Australia. Continental Europe accounted for 14% of respondents, and Brazil, China, Ecuador, India, Israel, Mexico, New Zealand, Singapore, and South Africa were represented as well. Clearly, usability testing, and thus participant recruiting, is a worldwide phenomenon.
Most companies recruit their own test participants, possibly because of the cost of engaging a specialized recruiting agency. Only 36% of respondents use an outside recruiting agency. Even these companies often handle some of their own recruiting: only 9% of respondents use outside agencies to find all their test participants.
The cost of using a recruiting agency can be substantial: the average agency fee was $107 per participant. There was substantial geographic variation in the fees, with the highest fees in the world paid in the West Coast region of the United States, where the average fee was $125 per participant. As we can attest from painful experience, Silicon Valley is not only an expensive place to do business, its also a place where you have to work extra hard to recruit people who have not already been studied to death.
Companies that do their own recruiting reported spending an average of 1.15 hours of staff time for each participant recruited. Still, 24% of respondents reported spending more than two hours per participant, so if you dont have a streamlined recruiting process in place with a skilled staff person who specializes in recruiting, it may not always pay off to handle recruiting in-house.
Recruiting fees also vary dramatically by user profile. It is no big surprise that agencies charge twice as much to recruit high-end professionals ($161 per person) as to recruit average consumers or students (about $84 per person).
Monetary incentives were paid to only 10% of participants in internal studies, such as tests of intranets or MIS systems. This finding corresponds well with our recommendation not to pay a companys own employees extra money simply to participate in usability testing, because they are already being paid for their time (see Tip 26).
About a third (35%) of companies did provide a non-monetary incentive to internal test participants, most commonly a small gift, such as a coupon for a free book or a lunch in the company cafeteria.
In contrast, participants recruited from the outside most often received cash as their incentive for coming to the test. 63% of external users received monetary compensation, 41% received non-monetary incentives, and 9% didnt get anything. (The numbers total more than 100% because a lucky 13% of external users were given both monetary and non-monetary incentives.)
The average incentive paid to external users was $64 per hour of test time. Again, the US West Coast was the most expensive with an average incentive of $81 per hour.
Incentives varied even more by user profile than the agency fees did. High-level professionals received almost four times as much as nonprofessional users ($118 vs. $32 per hour, on average).
The average no-show rate was 11%, meaning that one out of nine users does not show up as promised. Unfortunately, no-show rates are highly variable from one study to the next, because of uncontrollable events like weather, traffic, and random personal events. So if you are running a standard simple test with five users, you might easily be hit by one or two no-shows.
We offer many tricks in this report for minimizing no-shows and for alleviating their impact on your study when they do occur, but unfortunately we cannot completely eliminate the problem. No-shows are highly annoying and, therefore, one of the main reasons we recommend paying fairly generous incentives to test participants, even when their normal hourly salary is relatively low.
We strongly recommend that you treat participant recruiting as an important component of your user experience process. The more you have an established and systematic approach to recruiting, the easier it will be to make studies happen when you want to get usability data.
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