Requirements for Creating a Participant Recruitment Database
There are several things you should know if you want to set up your own participant database for recruiting people for your activity. Unfortunately, the creation of a participant database does not happen overnight. It will take some work on your part to create and maintain it.
Develop a Questionnaire for Potential Participants
There are a variety of avenues you can pursue to add people to your database. After you have considered the ethical and legal implications of collecting participant information (see Chapter 3, page 66), the next thing you will want to do is develop a questionnaire for potential participants to complete. This is the information that you will enter into your database and use to query when you have an activity. (See Chapter 10, “Surveys” on page 266 to learn how to develop an effective survey.)
Some basic information you will want to include is the following:
■ Address
■ E-mail address
■ Phone numbers (cell, home, work)
■ Job title
■ Age
■ Gender
■ Company name
■ Company size
■ Industry
■ Technology experience
■ How the person found out about your questionnaire (this can help you track the most effective methods for signing people up)
The rest of the details really depend on what is important for you to know when you are trying to recruit participants (Figure A.1).
Distribute Your Questionnaire
Now that you have your questionnaire, you need to distribute it to potential participants. Some distribution methods are described below.
Attend Trade Shows or Conferences
Attending trade shows or conferences where you think your users might be provides the opportunity to speak with end users in person and hand out your questionnaire. For example, if you are looking for Mac users, go to Macworld. If you are looking for electronics users, go to the Consumer Electronics Show. It is ideal if you can get a booth and offer people goodies for signing up or enter their name in a prize drawing if they sign up.
Visit Places Your Users Hang Out
Some businesses like coffee shops or grocery stores will allow you to set up a table on the sidewalk and distribute fliers. If possible, have a laptop or tablet handy to sign users up on the spot. You can even combine the sign-up effort with on-the-spot studies like quick interviews (see Chapter 9, page 220) or usability evaluations (see Chapter 14, page 432). This gives people an idea of what they are signing up for and they can receive an immediate incentive. Farmers’ markets and community centers are also great locations to sign up a variety of people. In every case, make sure you obtain permission from the owner or manager of the location, as well as any applicable permits.
Put a Link on Your Company Website
Place a link to your web-based questionnaire on your company’s website and in-product. The best locations are on a page that talks about your company’s user research program and your company’s home page.
Put a Link on an Electronic Community Bulletin Board
Just like an ad that you put up to recruit people for a specific activity, place an ad to invite people to sign up for your participant database. Costs vary depending on where you want to place the ad, but you can get a lot of responses by doing so.
Recruit People Who Participate in Your Activities
If you have participants who come in for activities from a source other than your participant database, invite them to join your database. (This may not be possible if the participants come from a recruiting agency—refer to Chapter 6, “Use a Recruiting Agency” section, page 140). You can do this at the end of your session, or you can send them a thank you note after the session and invite them to sign up.
Partner with Academic Centers That Are Engaged with the Community
If you are an academic researcher, it is likely that you work in an institution that already has a center that is engaged with the community you are interested in recruiting. For example, Clemson has the Institute for Engaged Aging that conducts workshops, seminars, and research with older adults. When Kelly is considering conducting user research with older adults, she reaches out to the director for guidance.
Technical Requirements for a Participant Database
There are some technical requirements to consider when planning your participant database. As with usability labs, you can build your participant database on the cheap or you can create an ideal participant database. Like everything else, there are pros and cons to each choice.
On the Cheap
Some companies offer databases with online forms (e.g., Knack, Zoho Creator, Google Forms) that enable you to create simple surveys.
Pros:
■ It can be free or relatively cheap.
■ The UIs make it easy to create a simple survey and database in a few minutes.
■ Because it is available online, versioning is not a problem if multiple people will be accessing the database.
■ You can quickly and easily search through your database for participants based on specific criteria.
Cons:
■ Securing participant data on someone else’s server means you must be aware of their security measures, privacy policies, and how the data are handled.
■ Depending on the limits of the tool you choose, you may hit size limits for the database.
More Extensive and Expensive
You can create a very simple participant database in Microsoft Excel or Microsoft Access® or an open-source alternative. These are easy to acquire, but you will notice this approach has several limitations.
Pros:
■ It is cheaper than using an enterprise database.
Cons:
■ If multiple people in your group will be leveraging the participant database, versioning may become a problem.
■ You will need to write macros to conduct searches for participants, based on certain criteria.
■ You will likely need to hire an IT professional or hosting service to build and post your survey online, as well as design the database and maintain it.
Most Extensive and Expensive
If your company or institution has an enterprise database, many of the problems listed above will be solved, but new ones arrive.
Pros:
■ Everything is included in one package (the database, scripting tools, the web server, and management, monitoring, and tuning tools).
■ Versioning is not an issue.
■ You can easily post your survey on the web and upload the results into your database.
■ You can quickly and easily search through your database for participants based on specific criteria.
■ You can create your infrastructure in the language of your choice (e.g., Perl, Java, SQL/PLSQL, C++) to run your form and get its contents into the database.
Cons:
■ You will need the time of your organization’s database administrator (DBA), system administrator, or software engineer to maintain your database and applications.
Maintenance Requirements for Any Solution
Regardless of which database you go with, you will need to keep it up to date. This is critical; information that is out of date is useless. Maintenance includes the following:
■ Removing or updating people whose contact information is no longer valid
■ Removing people who no longer want to participate
■ Adding new entries on a regular basis
■ Tracking when each participant came in and how much he or she was paid (refer to Chapter 6, “Determining Participant Incentives” section, page 127)
■ Adding comments about certain participants after activities (“great participant,” “arrived late,” etc.)
■ Moving people to a watch list (refer to Chapter 6, “Create a Watch List” section, page 151)
Ideally, you want the people who sign up for your database to instantly update their own data and remove themselves, rather than having to submit their requests to someone else. In some states, you are legally required to remove individuals from your database within a specific time period of the individual making the request. By removing individuals automatically, rather than requiring someone at your company to manually do it, you can ensure you are adhering to the law.