pLAn And prepAre for the reseArch

First of all, identify the point person—the person responsible for the plan, the keeper of the checklist. This can be anyone on the team, whether or not they’re participating in the research; it just has to be one person. This will help keep things from falling through the cracks.

Sketching out an initial plan can be very quick if you’re work-ing by yourself or with a small group. Decide how much time and money you will be devoting to research, and who will be involved in which roles. Identify subjects and, if necessary, de-cide how you’re going to recruit them. Include a list of materials.

In the beginning, don’t worry about getting everything right.

If you don’t know, go with your best guess. Since research is about seeking out new information, you’re going to encounter new situations and unpredictable circumstances. Make friends with the unexpected. And prepare to change the plan you’ve made to adapt once you have facts.

You might plan for sixty-minute sessions but find that you’re getting all the information you need in half an hour. Or you might find that the name of a particular competitor keeps com-ing up durcom-ing an interview, so you decide to add fifteen minutes of competitive usability testing to the interview so that you can observe your target customers using their service.

Just be very clear about the points at which changes to your research plans might affect your larger project. It’s easy to be optimistic, but it’s more helpful to think about trade-offs and fallback plans in a cool moment before you get started. What will you do if recruiting and scheduling participants looks like it’s going to take longer than you’ve planned? You can push out the dates, relax your criteria for participants, or talk to fewer people now and try for more later. There’s no one right answer—only the best way to meet your overall project goals at the time.

thE PRo cEss 41 In addition to answering your research questions, you’ll continue to learn more about research itself. Each activity will make you smarter and more efficient. So much win.

Your research plan should include your problem statement, the duration of the study, who will be performing which roles, how you will target and recruit your subjects, plus any incen-tives or necessary tools and materials.

This is just the start. You can always add more details as they’re helpful to you or your team.

Recruiting

Recruiting is simply locating, attracting, screening, and acquiring research participants. There’s no draft, so you have to recruit.

Good recruiting puts the quality in your qualitative research.

Since you’ll probably be working with a small sample size, you need the individual participants to be as good as they can be.

Participants are good to the extent they represent your target.

If participants don’t match your target, your study will be use-less. You can learn valuable things by asking the right people the wrong questions. If you’re talking to the wrong people, it doesn’t matter what you ask. Bad participants can undermine everything you’re trying to do.

A good research participant:

• Shares the concerns and goals of your target users.

• Embodies key characteristics of your target users, such as age or role.

• Can articulate their thoughts clearly.

• Is as familiar with the relevant technology as your target users.

In theory, recruiting is just fishing. Decide what kind of fish you want. Make a net. Go to where the fish are. Drop some bait in the water. Collect the ones you want. It isn’t actually that mysterious, and once you get the hang of it, you’ll develop good instincts.

In practice, recruiting is a time-consuming pain in the ass.

Embrace it. Get good at it and all of your research will be faster and easier, plus this part of the process will get progressively less unpleasant.

When designing web applications or websites, the web is a terrific place to find potential test participants. If you happen to have a high-traffic website you can put a link on, that’s the easiest way to draw people in (unless you need to recruit people who have never been to that site). Otherwise you can email a link to a screener—a survey that helps you identify potential partici-pants that match your criteria—or post the screener where it will be visible.

Go anywhere you’re allowed to post a message that might be seen by your target users or their forward-happy friends and family. Twitter. Craigslist. Facebook. LinkedIn.

If you need people in a certain geographic area, see whether there are local community sites or blogs that would announce it as a service. Referring to it as “design research” rather than “mar-keting research” goes a long way in the goodwill department.

There are such things as professional recruiters, but you probably have every advantage they describe.

The net is your screener. The bait is the incentive.

A screener is simply a survey with questions to identify good participants and filter out anyone who would just waste your time. This is incredibly important. You can tell a good recruit immediately when you test. Good test participants care. When presented with a task, they get right into the scenario. You could offer a greasy piece of paper with a couple of rectangles scrawled on it and say “How would you use this interface to buy tickets to a special exhibit?” and if you’re talking to someone who buys tickets, by God they will try.

Mismatched participants are just as obvious as any other sort of bad blind date. Their attention will drift. They will go off on irrelevant tangents about themselves. (“I shoplift for fun.”) You could show them a fully functional, whiz-bang prototype and be met with stares and unhelpful critiques. (“Do all the links have to be blue? I find that really dull.”) And you will find a way to politely shake their hand and send them packing as soon as

thE PRo cEss 43 possible. (With the incentive promised, by the way. It’s not their fault they didn’t get properly screened.)

The most efficient method of screening is an online survey.

(See the Resources section for suggested tools for creating sur-veys and recruiting participants.) To write the screener, you and your team will need to answer the following questions, adapted from an article by Christine Perfetti (http://bkaprt.com/jer/4/):

What are all of the specific behaviors you’re looking for?

Behaviors are the most important thing to screen for. Even if you’re designing something you believe to be totally novel, cur-rent behaviors determine whether your design has a chance of being relevant and intelligible to the participants.

If you’re designing an app for cyclists, you need to test the app with people who ride bikes, not people who love bikes and wish they had time to ride.

What level of tool knowledge and access do participants need?

Be realistic about the amount of skill and comfort you’re target-ing. And if you need them to have certain equipment or access to participate, make sure to mention that. Back in the old days we had to screen out a lot of people who couldn’t talk on the phone and use the internet at the same time because they used the same line for both.

To usability-test a mobile app, you need people who are sufficiently familiar with their device to focus on the app’s usability. Otherwise, you might end up testing the phone and get nothing useful.

What level of knowledge about the topic (domain knowledge) do they need?

If you’re truly designing something for very general audiences in a familiar domain—say, reading the news—you should verify that they actually do the activities you’re asking about, but you don’t have to screen for knowledge about the subject matter. On

the other hand, if you’re making an iPad app that helps mechan-ics work on cars, don’t test with brain surgeons.

Writing a screener is a good test of your empathy with your target users. To have reliable results, you need to screen in the right potential participants, screen out the bad matches, and prevent professional research participants from trying to read your mind to get the study incentive. Even a $25 Amazon gift certificate will attract wily dissemblers. Be vague about the con-tents of the actual test. If you recruit people from the site you are testing, then just refer to “an interview about this website.”

Asking age, gender, and location allows you to avoid certain biases, but you also need to get at differences in behavior pat-terns that may have implications for your design.

For example, when recruiting for a usability study for the science and technology museum, you might ask the following question: how frequently do you engage in the following activi-ties? (Answers could be: never or rarely; at least once a year; a few times per year; at least once a month; at least once a week.)

• Go to the movies.

• Go hiking.

• Go to an amusement park.

• Try a new restaurant.

• Visit a museum.

• See live music or go to a club.

• See other local sights.

• Go out of town for the weekend.

This question serves two purposes: it gauges museum-visiting frequency without giving away the topic of the study, and it offers a way to assess general habits around getting out of the house.

At the same time, you should make the screener as short as possible to make it less likely potential participants will bail before they get to the end.

thE PRo cEss 45 For in-person testing, it’s best to follow up by phone with everyone who made the first cut. Asking a couple of quick ques-tions will weed out axe murderers and the fatally inarticulate and may save you from a very awkward encounter. For example, “I just want to ask a couple more questions to see whether you’re a good match for our study. Could you tell me how you typically decide what to do on your days off?”

If the answer is a terse “I don’t,” or a verbose description of cat-hoarding and revenge fantasies, just reply that you’ll be in touch and follow up with an email thanking them for their interest.

Just like formulating queries in Google, writing screeners and reviewing the results you get makes you better and more accurate at screening. And even if it takes a little time to get it right, all the available online tools sure beat standing on the cor-ner with a clipboard like market researchers still sometimes do.