Selecting & recruiting participants.
Selecting participants.
Develop user profiles.
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Have representation for all target audiences in the
population.
- Prospective students.
- Current students.
- Faculty.
- Staff.
- Alumni.
Get a random sample.
- Why:
- A random sample derived from the entire population is key to getting meaninful results.
- There should not be a way that one member of the population has a better chance of being selected than any other.
- Randomization is important to cancel out personal traits and idiosycracies of individuals.
- How:
- Use a database of potential participants for each target audience.
- Assign each participant a number.
- Then pick participants with a random number generator program.
Define and qualify characteristics for each subgroup.
- Typical traits examined include age, gender, education, computer experience, web experience.
Decide how many people to include in a test.
- According to Jakob Nielsen, you need to test with only five users to find 85 percent of the problems. 1
- Alan Woolrych says that "the issue is not whether five users are enough. It's an issue of the costs, benefits and risks of running some number of users with known relevant characteristics. Three may be enough. Twenty may not be enough." 2
- Steve Krug asserts that in most cases the "ideal number of users for each round of testing is three, or at most four." Don't Make Me Think! A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, Que, 2000. p. 146.
- Plan for dropouts and no shows.
Recruiting participants.
- Recruiting time is approximately one to three hours per participant.
- To ensure consistent methodology only one person should recruit participants.
- The recruiter logs all contacts made and qualifies prospective participants via recruiting script and questionnaire.
Payment or other incentives.
- Don't have to pay participants with money, a UMD T-shirt, cup, mouse pad, or just a cup of coffee are often enough.
- It is important to give the participant something as an incentive.
