Planning a Usability Study with a Paper Prototype - Paper Prototyping: The Fast and Easy Way to Define and Refine User Interfaces - page 89

User Recruitment

There are many good references on user recruitment, so here I only to touch on the main factors that
affect planning and scheduling. First you must decide whether to manage user recruitment internally or
outsource it to a company (such as a market research firm) that specializes in doing this sort of thing.
The best decision depends on the following:

1. Time. It's time-consuming to play phone tag with people, screen them, schedule them, send out

paperwork and reminders, and so on. Some of this work can be done through email, but it still
takes a nontrivial amount of time to manage the process.

2. Money. Depending on the user profile and your geographic area, you can pay upward of $100

per user to have an outside company do user recruitment (not counting the money you have to
pay the users). This may be outside your means, or it may be money well spent.

3. Frequency of usability studies. One R&D department I know of has a contractor who works

20 hours a week scheduling usability tests. This makes sense for them because the department
has several projects underway at a time, and they do frequent usability studies. Consider
whether others at your company might also want to conduct usability studies; perhaps you can
share recruitment resources.

4. Sources of users. Sometimes you may have no clue where to find users, or you may want

people who are unfamiliar with your product or company. (If the latter, you obviously can't put an
invitation on your own Web site.) Brainstorm about how your users get their news and
professional information; to reach them, you might use newspaper or radio ads or flyers posted
at a local college, professional organizations, user groups, and so on. If you're still struggling for
ideas on how to find users, working with a recruiting firm may be your best bet.

5. Whether your users are customers. If you know who your customers are, it may be easiest to

just contact them yourself. (A market research firm can work from a list that you provide and
save you some time, but this usually doesn't save you money because they have to do almost
as much work.) Be sensitive to the politics involved in dealing with customers—if people in your
Sales/Marketing department have existing relationships with customers, you should discuss your
plans with them first to determine the best way to proceed.

If you work with an outside company, they will likely want you to write a screener, which in essence
means turning your bullet-list user profile into a series of questions, like a flow chart, that lets the
company know whether a particular person meets your needs or not. The company you're working with
should be able to provide you an example of the format they'd like you to use. Creating a screener can
take a couple of hours, but it can often be reused for subsequent usability tests as long as the user
profile remains the same. A screener can also be useful if you are doing recruitment internally, although
if a member of your core team is doing recruitment they may not need one.

If you decide to do user recruitment internally, think about who might be well suited for the task. If you
have an extroverted co-worker who's good at administrative details, managing user recruitment may be
a perfect career enhancement opportunity for that person, as well as something he or she would enjoy.