To make recruiting easier for you and your organization in the future, we offer tips for building a participant database and hiring and managing a staff of recruiting specialists.
Often throughout this report, we suggest creating a spreadsheet or database of participants from which you can draw candidates for future studies. Of the NN/g recruiting survey respondents, 18% ask current participants for referrals, and 3% ask current participants if they’d like to return for future studies. Keep in mind, however, the caveats we mention in When to Avoid Reusing Participants on page 78.
You don’t need to track an enormous amount of information. We suggest including the following items:
Date participant is entered and by whom
Participant’s name, job title, and company or school name (if known)
Participant’s contact information: voice, fax, email, and cell / pager (if known)
Participant’s gender and age range
Short profile of participant’s experience
Computers used (Mac, PC, Unix)
Software (non-games as well as games)
Web (in addition to email)
Domain field (finance, technical, marketing, for example)
Consumer shopping (if appropriate).
Participant’s past study dates and systems evaluated (even if not in one of your studies)
Short description of positive or negative aspects of participant’s past sessions
Who referred participant (if applicable)
Use readily available spreadsheet or database software.
The information we suggest you track can be maintained easily in an Excel, Lotus, or other spreadsheet. If you plan to grow your file to include hundreds of entries, however, consider starting with an actual database program, such as Microsoft Access, Act! or FileMaker Pro.
Whenever possible, get referrals and add them to your participant file.
Ask non-agency-recruited participants to recommend their colleagues, associates, friends, and family who may be qualified and interested in participating in usability studies. Keep in mind that you will want to cross-check for close relationships before you inadvertently schedule two people from the same company or family in the same study. (See the anecdote under Tip 137.)
Include participants you may have disqualified for a current study, especially if they might be qualified for a future study.
Participants you may have disqualified for a study may be well-qualified for a future study. If so, and they seem interested, enter their information into your participant spreadsheet or database for future use. However, flag in your database any unqualified participants whom you don’t want to use again so you don’t inadvertently recruit them again later.
Audit your participant database yearly.
Weed out participants who are no longer available or interested, and update contact information for those who are still viable candidates. If you have the staff available to do so, audit the database more often—say, every six months. One way to do this unobtrusively might be to send out holiday greetings with mail-back cards for changed information.
Put into place a security policy for the database.[52]
Create a security policy for the database that lists the rules for using it and for protecting participants’ privacy. Don’t put the database on a machine available to the Internet, and consider password access.
Only 12% of the NN/g recruiting survey respondents have dedicated recruiters on staff. If your company has the budget, however, and your user experience group is very busy conducting usability studies full time, you may at some point consider hiring recruiting staff to augment the UE group. Our survey results indicate that people who both run the study and also do the recruiting have a higher no-show rate than any other recruiter, internal or external. If you don’t think you have the budget to hire someone, consider mentoring someone within your organization to become a recruiter.
Don’t worry if you think you cannot keep a recruiter busy full-time—you can assign this person other usability related activities, which will only help augment his or her recruiting skills. The more your recruiter understands about usability, the better.
Choose as your recruiter or recruiter-trainee a person who is multi-talented.
An effective recruiter:
Likes to talk
Enjoys speaking with people
Has a well-modulated, pleasant speaking voice
Reads aloud well, without sounding stilted or unnatural
Has performed some other type of professional telephone interviewing.
Has good computer and Web skills
Can effectively use word-processing, spreadsheet, database, and Web tools.
Has good communication skills
Has decent writing skills
Communicates very well verbally
Will keep the study team apprised of recruiting progress and difficulties.
Is genuinely interested in usability
Knows, or will learn, some usability basics. (Reading the three usability books in the References section is a good start.)
Shows interest in observing some study sessions.
Has good project coordination skills
Demonstrates attention to detail
Is diligent in following up with participants
Can multitask.
Avoid candidates who are more interested in a usability engineering job.
You may receive applications from people who are interested in a career as usability engineer[53] even though they don’t have the professional skills for the job. We recommend hiring only someone who views recruiting as a rewarding job for its own sake—avoid treating the recruiter position as an entry-level job for usability engineering. If the new hire is more interested in a usability engineer job, one of two things could happen: 1) s/he may simply bide time waiting for the more interesting opening, not adequately performing their current job, or, 2) if the person performs very well, you will soon promote him or her to the desired job, and you would then have to train a new recruiter.
Schedule a phone interview with a potential recruiter, even if s/he is someone you already know.
A phone interview will give you a chance to assess a potential recruiter’s telephone skills and voice quality in context.
Provide a generic screener to a potential recruiter and have him/her screen you and other colleagues.
You will be able to assess how well a potential recruiter reads a script and screening questions and fields questions from potential participants.
Show a potential recruiter your current recruiting and participant forms and ask him/her to suggest improvements.
You will be able to assess:
How well the candidate understands your process
His / her attention to detail
Whether s/he willingly takes initiative.
Consider including some minor flaw, such as a compound or confusing question, to assess the astuteness of an experienced recruiter or to demonstrate a flaw to an inexperienced one.[54]
Ask an experienced recruiter about participant follow-up, scheduling backups, and handling no-shows.
You will be able to assess the candidate’s experience level by how knowledgably s/he discusses these issues with you.
Ask all potential recruiters to demonstrate or discuss the skills listed in Tip 224.
Consider administering a skills-assessment form to see what the potential recruiter sees as personal strengths and weaknesses.
Expect to pay recruiters a salary commensurate with a skilled administrative assistant in your organization.
Expect to pay a bit more than that for an experienced recruiter.
Consider other tasks your recruiters can do.
If your recruiters are not busy with full-time screening and scheduling, train them to perform other usability study-related tasks, such as:
Setting up the session room
Ordering and setting out food and beverages
Preparing participant session forms from templates
Resetting the system and getting forms ready between sessions
Hosting and greeting participants
Occupying the attention of child participants after sessions, while they wait for parents to arrive
Obtaining, preparing the receipts for, and disbursing incentives
Creating and maintaining a participant spreadsheet or database
Arranging for other needs or providing transportation.
Tabulating questionnaire or survey data (if you are satisfied with their attention to detail)
Training other recruiters before things get busy again.
When your staff is not busy with full-time usability work, you can ask recruiters to help with some other administrative tasks.
Help recruiters feel involved in usability.
Invite recruiters to observe some sessions, especially ones for which they’ve done the screening and scheduling.
Have recruiters attend usability study or process planning meetings to learn what goes into building the screening criteria.
Schedule recruiters as dry run or possibly even pilot participants.
[52] Chauncey Wilson, Director, Bentley College Design and Usability Testing Center, provided this tip.
[53] For the purposes of this discussion, we can think of a usability engineer as a specialized professional who conducts studies, analyzes data, and works with a design team to improve the quality of user interfaces.
[54] Chauncey Wilson, Director, Bentley College Design and Usability Testing Center, contributed the “flaw” suggestion.