Chapter . Planning Your Recruiting Needs

Successful participant recruiting takes thought and planning. This section helps you plan your recruiting needs with advice for:

  • Developing recruiting criteria that will help you get representative participants,

  • Determining appropriate incentives to encourage participation, and

  • Choosing a study locale convenient to participants, which will garner a good show rate.

As noted in the introduction, to get the data you need to make the best user-centered decisions for your system—which may be a website, a physical product, or software—you need the right participants. So, our first recruiting tip is really more of a rule for conducting successful studies.

The Cardinal Rule for Recruiting

  1. Know thy users

    Any good usability ...

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