Recruiting for User Testing

[Sean Scott-5]

We're looking to do some user testing in the Los Angeles area by end
of November.  

I'm looking for a company you've used before for recruitment and
have had a good experience with, in terms of both response and
quality of recruits.


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[Tony Tulathimutte]

For in-person research, we've gone with Davis Recruitment, and they
did a great job.

Outside of agency recruiting, you should also look into recruiting
using a form on your website, if you've never tried it before. You
can use a tool like Ethnio (ethnio.com), which is specially built for
user research recruiting, to place a short screener survey on your
website. As soon as your web visitors' responses come in, you can
contact them to participate in your research study. You can also use
automatic form builders like Google Docs' forms feature
(docs.google.com) and Wufoo (wufoo.com).

One advantage of recruiting this way is that you can talk to people
who actually came to your website because they're interested in your
product or service%u2014that's not always the case with recruiting
agencies. If you're conducting a remote user study, you can also
contact recruits to begin the study at the very moment that they
submit the recruiting form, which means you can actually watch them
using your website or product as they normally would.

Full disclosure, I work for the makers of Ethnio, Bolt | Peters. We
also specialize in live online recruiting and remote user research
methods; feel free to email us at info [at] boltpeters [dot] com if
you have any questions about live recruiting. Hope this helps!


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Posted from the new ixda.org
http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=47283


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[Jared Spool]

Hi Sean,

We recently used UsabilityWorks (http://usabilityworks.com) to recruit  
34 participants in CA and TX and they did a smash-up job. Everyone  
showed up, matching what we were looking for exactly, and ready to  
participate in the study. I highly recommend them and we'll continue  
to use them for all of our recruiting.

That said, if you want to do something at the end of the month, you  
better contact them right away. The first effort from a good  
recruiting company takes time to get up to speed. If you wait any  
longer, you won't have enough quality participants for your study.

Jared

p.s. Unless you're administering a quiz to the participants, it's a  
"usability test", not a "user test". You're not testing the users,  
you're testing the design.

Jared M. Spool
User Interface Engineering
510 Turnpike St., Suite 102, North Andover, MA 01845
e: jspool@... p: [phone]
http://uie.com  Blog: http://uie.com/brainsparks  Twitter: @jmspool



On Nov 9, 2009, at 10:17 AM, Sean Scott wrote:

> We're looking to do some user testing in the Los Angeles area by end
> of November.
>
> I'm looking for a company you've used before for recruitment and
> have had a good experience with, in terms of both response and
> quality of recruits.

________________________________________________________________
Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)!
To post to this list ....... discuss@...
Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe
List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines
List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help