Rob,
With all due love and respect, I disagree with these recommendations.
At least, two of them.
On Feb 6, 2009, at 7:39 AM, Rob Tannen wrote:
Vicki - Some recommended bast practices for participant recruitment
and retention:
-Expect a 25% cancellation/no-show rate. So for every four slots you
need to fill, you need to recruit 5 people. You can schedule extra
slots or use "floaters" -- people scheduled to serve as
substitutes overlapping with specific time slots. If you're running
ahead of schedule you can include the floaters as well.
25%!!! We have less than a 2% no-show rate across thousands of
participants (including neurosurgeons!) over the last 20 years. (We
don't get paid if participants don't show up, so we don't have any
tolerance for no-shows.)
If you have a 25% no-show rate, you've got something really wrong with
your recruiting practice. There's no excuse that 1 out of 4 folks
don't show up.
In most studies, you never have to recruit floaters. For the
occasional high-priority study, you might include a couple of extra
participants in the original schedule to be safe. We do that for one
out of every ten studies we do.
-Remind recruited participants ahead of time (week before, then day
before). Tell people to come in 15 minutes before the actual testing
slow and then call them on their cell phones if they are not there at
that time.
This is better. Though, since we almost never have no-shows, we don't
bother with the 15-minute "before" thing. No sense in wasting anyone's
time when everyone is where they are supposed to be.
-Pay more money. Increase your participant incentive by 10-20% can
be a cost-effective way to improve show-up rates.
Huh. We deal with many participants that can't, by law, get paid for
helping us. They still show up when they are supposed to. Money to get
people to show us is a trap that will likely lead to lower quality
sessions. You really don't want people who are there for the money.
(The money is really just to prove to them that you're serious and not
going to turn it into a timesharing sales session.)
It really sounds to me like your recruitment process could use an
overhaul if this is what you're seeing for results.
That's my $0.02.
Jared
Jared M. Spool
User Interface Engineering
510 Turnpike St., Suite 102, North Andover, MA 01845
e: jsp...@uie.com p: +1 978 327 5561
http://uie.com Blog: http://uie.com/brainsparks Twitter: jmspool
UIE Web App Summit, 4/19-4/22: http://webappsummit.com
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