Who you research with is nearly more important than what you research
Everyone’s time seems ever more tight, and having less than the ideal amount of time to complete a project seems the unfortunate side effect of that. We’ve all got stakeholders who are screaming for results, and that ends up sometimes making us squeeze our own timeframes and those of the team we’re working with.
One area of project preparation where the expectation is that time can be saved is in recruitment. We aim to have a two week window to recruit participants for a study as a general rule, but sometimes we are asked to turn things around quicker. In some instances, such as when the target is quite general or broad, asking our recruiter to turn around a list of participants faster isn’t as much of a problem, but in other instances, such as when the recruitment specifications call for a very specific target such as “Alaskan Malamute dog breeders based in Parramatta who are looking to purchase a new car in the next three months” (okay, I’m exaggerating here, but you get the picture), recruitment at short notice is not as easy.
In situations where timing becomes critical, we inevitably will have to compromise on at least some aspect of the recruitment to meet the deadline. We may have to agree to a broader age target than we would have wanted to test with, or a different mix of genders than is ideal. These impacts can sometimes be significant on the end result of our projects, because the profiles of the users we test with do not replicate the target closely enough. This could skew our results, or have the effect of masking significant issues that may have come to light had we tested with the appropriate target.
When we think about all of the factors that are at play in a usability project, the participants we test with are critical to the process. The most carefully crafted research plan will not deliver the insights we need about a target if the participants we test with are just too far off the target of interest. Garbage in, garbage out.