Does not compute image
This morning, while recruiting participants for an upcoming startup usability study, I stumbled upon a mythical creature I didn’t think existed. After chasing it through the underbrush of the internet to no avail, I eventually gave up, disgusted and disheartened, for the creature was gone – potentially forever.
And the creature in question? That rare breed of human who doesn’t have access to a DSL connection.
I know, I know, breathe in deeply – I didn’t think they existed, either. But it turns out that this kind of person is out there, and we have to plan for them accordingly. More and more I find that people respond to my online recruitment ads, often for a remote study that needs screensharing and the like, without having the necessary technological hardware to actually complete the study. Like that story where from the band of monkeys eventually one will write Shakespeare, sometimes potential participants make it into the pool when they really shouldn’t.
It would be easy to blame the participant – I mean, who doesn’t have DSL access these days in the U.S., anyway? As it turns out, quite a few people don’t, so in the end it really is our bad as user researchers, not the participants. We need to make sure we’re designing studies – and recruitment procedures – that aren’t exclusionary from a technological perspective, even when we’re building a product or service that requires (relatively) advanced technology.
Examples of non-traditional recruitment abound: Etan once stood in a BART station for hours to recruit BART riders, while Mick loitered in a Best Buy (with permission of course) hoping to snag potential wireless hub buyers. The main problem, however, is that these methods, while often very effective, are time consuming – and expensive.
So how to recruit in an internet-ready world, when we’re not all on the same technological page? Any thoughts? Examples?
I’m running a stealth usability study for an iPhone app at the moment, and we’re on a tight 4 week RITE (Rapid Iterative Test and Evaluation) schedule.
For those not in the know, RITE is a way of condensing the usability and design prototyping process into a short time frame. Instead of testing a dozen users in one big batch, writing a report with design recommendations, submitting the report, making some of the design changes (or not), and then starting the testing all over again, RITE lets us do the same thing in about a month. We test 4 users every week instead of 12 once a month; we make design changes on the fly instead of waiting for a report to be produced; we get all the stakeholders involved so things can happen today and tomorrow, instead of next week or next month. In many ways, RITE is the way that usability – and design more generally – should always be done (in my opinion).
One of the problems with RITE, however (and there are a few, believe you me) is that recruiting users becomes a pressure-filled activity. Instead of having weeks to schedule participants, fill in missing slots, etc., we have days to schedule people, sometimes only one day. For example, I scheduled 2 users yesterday for a session today – pretty nuts if you ask me.
But this entry isn’t so much about RITE, or how to test an iPhone app, or why an external USB camera doesn’t play nice with live streaming and a screencast – I’ll get to all these issues in good time. No, this time I want to focus on a particular user (who shall not be named for obvious reasons), and how persistent she was today. If any of you live in the Bay Area you’ve probably heard that the Bay Bridge is closed, which is wreaking havoc on…well, just about everything. And this poor user-who-shall-not-be-named made a valiant effort today to get across said closed bridge, only to spend another hour and a half trying to get into town from the East Bay. She finally gave up when she realized that making the session would mean leaving her daughter stranded at school without a ride.
So to every user who has ever spent an inordinate amount of time getting to a session, all in the name of a better product, I salute you.
