233 Tips and Tricks for Recruiting Users as Participants in Usability Studies

Chapter . Future Planning

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.

Building and Maintaining a Participant Database

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.

1. Keep the data simple.

   You don’t need to track an enormous amount of information. We suggest including ...