User Recruitment Best Practices Ever wonder why project teams struggle to find users to interview and interact with? User recruitment is hard, and doing it right takes considerable time and consideration. A quick google search on the topic will quickly lead to quotes like “participant recruitment is the unglamorous foundation for all user testing.” And while unglamorous, the reward of a grounded insight from interviews and testing makes all this worth the effort. This document outlines some initial research on best practices for user recruitment and partner development. Because your goals may be slightly different than those of the organizations whose stories and best practices are shared here, take these as suggestions and find what works best with your teams and your studios.

#1: Provide Incentives In the design world: Providing incentives for user participation is an industry standard. According to a 2003 study by the Nielsen Norman group, many companies recruit in house (about 64%), like Intuit, and others contract dedicate recruitment firms for their user recruitment. Such recruitment firms, like People for Research, have fine­tuned their process to what they’ve seen work well over the last 15+ years. Emma Millington, Head of Projects at People for Research, says not having incentives for participants “may be a bit of a deal­breaker.” She goes on to say that if incentives were low or non­existent, they wouldn’t take on the project. In the past, they’ve been approached by charities and nonprofits that have a budget for the recruitment firm, but not for user interaction. PFR sees that when incentives are low, user engagement is low too. Emma makes the point that any participant’s “time has a value beyond many”, and to disregard this can be a mistake. And professional design and user recruitment firms aren’t the only place where incentive for participation is standard. When is the last time you signed up for a psychology study and they didn’t give you something in exchange for your time? Below is a table of average incentives costs from a survey of 201 usability professionals from the Nielsen Norman Group study:

Average participant $64

West Coast $81

Non­professionals $32

High­level Professionals $118

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In DFA: DFA teams are essentially in the same boat as academics and professional designers. Despite the overwhelming evidence that some form of incentive for a participant’s time and input is fundamental for their interaction, many teams do not do this. Why? It’s possible to recruit friends and family for free. It’s easy to explain the good­natured endeavor of your project and get by without incentivizing things and drawing on the intrinsic motivation of participants to help a cause larger than themselves. In fact, in the 2014 Fall term, Northwestern’s DFA Studio set up a trip to Misericordia, their community partner. They didn’t need to pay participants because they’ve established a mutual understanding with Misericordia which allows them to research without incentives. However. The struggle of finding enough users remains a persistent challenge for most DFA teams, and pulling on a user’s heartstrings doesn’t always strike a chord. And for many project teams, there is no community partner; maybe your team doesn’t have money or the resources to provide this yet. So if you don’t have a partner or finding one doesn’t seem feasible, how can you create those opportunities for building empathy in person with users? Recommendations: Work with your studio leadership to set a portion of the budget for user recruitment. Bake food for the users incoming, partner with local companies or restaurants for in­kind donations and offer these non­cash incentives to participants, like free Chipotle, or gloves from North Face, and get a brainstorm going around different incentives and ways to provide incentives to users. Do whatever you need to do to get incentives for users, but don’t sit back and allow your window of user recruitment to close. Keep in mind, however, that finding the right incentive for your particular user is important. Incentivizing children for educational projects may require checking in with caretakers or teachers to identify appropriate incentives, just as the technologically curious may appreciate something more technologically oriented over straight cash. Everyone, however, still is another human like you and me and deserves warm and considerate treatment for the gracious favor they are providing. For a more detailed analysis of proper ways to perform user recruiting, read through the full report by the Nielsen Norman Group.

#2: Maintain a Database In the design world: Another staple of established design firms is the User Database. Hannah Hudson, Rotational Development Program Associate at Intuit and DFA alumnus, is responsible for scheduling user interactions throughout her team’s design process. Hannah describes the user database as a searchable history of everyone who has ever participated in an Intuit user research study complete with demographic and occupational descriptions. It’s like a pack of “baseball cards

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[with] tons of people who have ever participated in the past and agreed for future visits.” Something like this, she says, makes scheduling interactions quick with a “turnaround time of days.” As an active practitioner of the design process, you may feel the weight of time pressure in user testing. Indeed, this sentiment is shared in Nielsen Norman book, Usability Engineering which concedes that “one of the major impediments to conducting user testing when it is needed is the time it may take to find appropriate users if one is not prepared.” They likewise recommend building a database to account for those quick­turnaround situations. In DFA: DFA teams will begin the user recruiting process when teams form, and that’s if they’re on top of their game. Last term in the Fall of 2014, none of the DFA fellows encountered a newly formed DFA team that had access to users on Day 1. Most teams fellows spoke with had users a few weeks into the term, which is impressive, truly. And the fellows’ knowledge is limited; there indeed may have been teams to start off their project with a user interaction whose story went untold. But on a quarter system with 10­week terms cut down into 8 weeks for recruitment, those first few weeks are precious, and by no means is user interaction on day 1 a standard. More to the point, fellows have yet to encounter a user recruitment databases for projects or studios. Once more, these indeed may exist, and if you do have such a file, the rest of the DFA Community would love to borrow on your practice. Send in a de­identified template of your form if you do. In the words of Dallas Clayton, “it’s never too late to start something new, to do all those things you’ve been longing to do…” Recommendation: ...like building a user database. Take a look at some existing user database for inspiration on what “fields” (column headers) to collect data on. How would you like to sort people? By profession, social class, education, footwear, movie genre preference, favorite ice cream flavor? You get to decide, and while some of the previous suggestions are more silly than serious these should be things you would find helpful when revisiting and looking to grab a relevant type of person for a new project. People for Research posted an article in 2014 that recommends “a good list should include names, contact telephone numbers, email addresses and as much relevant information to your criteria as possible e.g. previous customer, potential customer, products purchased. This allows you to get in touch with your relevant potential participants easily.” There are online web tools for this sort of thing as well, like Ethnio or UserZoom, which does a great job to both record users and coordinate meetings, though well­constructed sites like these typically come with a subscription fee that companies like IDEO, Adobe, Code for America, even Crate and Barrel use. To start though, make an excel sheet or a google

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spreadsheet and securely track these things in whatever way you find works best. Call on these databases in times of need.

#3: Write Effective Briefs In the design world: First, what is a “brief”? They’re study descriptions. They are the document that outline the nature of the research, the objective of the study, the type of user you’re looking for complete with demographics and occupation, and any additional information relevant for you or your recruiter to know how to get who you’re looking for. These are the documents that the And they’re typically 3 pages. People for Research wrote an article in 2013 that claims “you are only as good as your brief.” A powerful statement. Indeed, even their personnel descriptions pay homage to the staffer’s ability to decipher a brief, as though this were an ability prized among many. That’s because knowing exactly who to look for and the bigger picture of the research is the crux of effective recruitment, and briefs are the project’s portal there. Attached is a brief template People for Research have shared. In DFA: The closest thing to this in DFA are project flyers. Two of the fellows, Julian and Brandon, collaborated on a construction worker safety challenge this past Fall of 2014. They made a few flyers and shared these with their mentors in this space, and doing so helped them connect with Gary Glader, the President of Network Safety Consultants, a subsidiary of an insurance broker. Julian and Brandon say “that phone conversation and the types of things we gleaned from that hour were foundational for much of our project research.” They point out that while that project flyer was necessary for communicating what they needed and who they needed to talk to, having friends and mentors in the DFA network like Billy Banks to facilitate connections proved indispensable. Recommendation: Even if you or your team is doing user recruitment yourself, the brief is a useful document. You may find that amongst your team members there are differing implied ideas about who your user is, and this document helps make those abundantly explicit. Try filling out one of these briefs at the start of your next HCD project (even sooner if you can help it) to get a sense of why it is useful. Additionally, make project flyers. The Construction Worker Safety Challenge Flyer is a limited example, as it does not include mention of incentives (regrettably, none were offered). You may find these documents useful to distribute to well­connected nodes in your social networks, who would then forward them on your behalf. Faculty advisors and project mentors are famously helpful for making seemingly random connections.

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#4: Create Your Recruitment Process Flow In the design world: For a user recruitment firm, what you may consider as an “extreme user” of the recruitment process, a visual flow of the recruitment process is a natural asset. Not every company necessarily has this piece, and it may be implicit for many organizations, but taking the time to visually articulate the steps involved is the first step in viewing the recruitment process as a modifiable and improvable thing. Below is a collection of recruitment process visuals.

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In DFA: If you have a visual of your partner/user recruitment process, please send it to your DFA fellow. Using the People for Research process visual as a basis, the following represents a version of the DFA User/Partner Recruitment Process.

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Recommendation: Draw your own user/partner recruitment process. Take a stab at recording what you have done in the past, what you’ve seen other DFAers do, what you’ve seen your local psychology research group do. Take the process graphic here and tweakify it. The link to the .ai file is here if you want to play with it in illustrator. Add a timeline that fits your studio schedule. Again, the attractive piece in doing this is to clip into a useful mentality about how to improve this experience for your teams. The graphic serves as a coherent synthesis of discrete opportunities for improvement (as does any User Journey Map. Also see this Pinterest Board for further inspiration).

#5: Dedicate Personnel In the design world: According the Nielsen Norman Group study, recruiting takes time. A lot. On average, recruiters spend “1.15 hours of staff time for each participant recruited. Still, 24% of respondents reported spending more than two hours per participant. If you don't have a streamlined recruiting process in place, with a skilled recruiting specialist, it might not pay off to handle recruiting in­house.” Recruiters do more than recruiting though. They are the ones they create that streamlined process, like the ones shown above. They also create those template documents, like E­mails to Partners, Briefs, Project Flyers, and Partner Lists. Organizations like Usability.gov are dedicated to sharing these sorts of best practices, and they have an open platform for exactly these things. In DFA: Many teams do not designate user recruiter as a role. Even the DFA National project team with Brandon and Julian did not initially dedicate user recruitment as a role on their project team, and it wasn’t until week 5 of their project that they began building empathy with construction workers and safety managers. Studios like MIT have dedicated Business Directors for forming partnerships with local companies, Northwestern has dedicated Project Scoping Directors for scoping projects and forming community partnerships, and Wash U has a dedicated Community Partner Liaison. As a result, these studios’ teams experience more frequent user interaction and higher quality insights because of their increased opportunities to build empathy. Recommendation: Make user recruitment a studio role, AND make it a team role. Whether you use a team charter to keep team members accountable to this or what, someone should be responsible for making sure this happens. Those in the studio role can be great for setting up things earlier than any team member would be able to do and transitioning that responsibility to team

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members after teams form. This does not mean the team’s user recruiter is the sole agent worker towards recruitment. Like any team role, it means they’re accountable for getting it done, and often that means getting help for teammates to do what is needed. They’ll be the ones creating the template documents mentioned above and getting the rest of the team on board. This role does take some effort, and it is highly rewarding. The user recruiter, when successful, is the team’s hero.

#6: Get Scrappy No review of user recruitment best practices would be complete without mention of some of the scrappier testing tactics. Viewed as a final resort for teams at Intuit, things like Mechanical Turk, UserTesting.com, Craigslist, or Hallway/Street Testing can sometimes get the job done. Of course, design firms prefer to avoid these methodologies if they can because they are less able to control the type of user they interact. But these activities can and do provide a level of insight that sitting in a studio room talking around a table simply cannot. Google Ventures posted an article recently about ways to find great participants for your study. The author, Michael Margolis, walks through the shared sentiment of the difficulty in finding users. The first thing he recommends? Don’t wait. And in the words of DFA alumnus James Kubik, “Get it done. Get it dirty.” So get out there, and start talking to some strangers (but be really nice and give them money. And clean up a little bit too.) Author: Brandon Rivera­Melo Brandon is a Northwestern University graduate working as a Design for America Fellow. He develops resources for DFA studios and teams to improve their design process. Contact him via email at brandon@designforamerica.com

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