User Research: Create Recruitment Criteria & a Participant Screener

1. Class Introduction: Hello there. My name is Devin Harold and the user experience research manager currently working at Verizon with over six years of experience working in the user experience, face either an interaction design strategy, detailed user experience, design or user research. Now, in my experience, conducting user research for large national recruitment, such as in home interviews or some motive tests such as usability testing or other quantitative evaluative tests, One of the things that I notice is very difficult is to how to really narrow down the right participants that you need. How is it that you get the right people in the room in order to make sure that you're making the most of your user research project and getting the most out of your results? So that's what this course is all about is to really die of deep into how to create participant recruitment criteria and your own screener and how to actually send that out into the world, either in a free forum or blawg that your customers may be at, or even through advertisements on Facebook or instagram alike. I'm also gonna talk to you a little bit more about how to send your recruitment criteria through a vendor such as Schlessinger, FieldWorks or platforms such as user testing as well. So we're gonna look at all of these different things within this course. This course is good for beginners because there's gonna be good tips and tricks along the way, as well as templates that will be provided that you can use throughout. And it's also great for experts who are currently doing user experience research work as it's a nice refresher. Now, in this class, you're going to specifically learn how to prepare your recruitment criteria, how to create your participants screener and then how to send it out as well. The class project is specifically gonna be around creating your own screener and you're screening questionnaire in order to evaluate how you're getting the right customers for your research projects, please stay engaged in the forum. Ask questions and I'll be here to help you along the way. Thank you so much. 2. Participant Criteria Prep: one quick tip here. Now what I typically do on my projects is I meet with my business partners or designers in order to better define what the project looks like, what we're looking to get out of a research project, what the goals are. And in that conversation. A lot of times that I've found is that we've gotten a good, high level understanding of the types of people we want to bring in the room. Now. This will really help guide your participants screening criteria and it ultimately your questions. But not to worry. You don't have to do that. It's definitely not required. But I would suggest that you meet with your business partners or any designers that you're working with to see if they have an idea before getting into your screening criteria. But not to worry the next video. I'm gonna show you how to create your participant screening criteria from scratch. Now, the first thing that you need to do in order to make sure you get the right customers in the room is to identify your participant criteria. What needs to be true to make sure that those you're bringing in will help give you the right insights to solve the problem at hand. Now I do this in five simple steps. Number one. Identify the methodology. Is it more generative in nature where you're driving innovation and change for new products and services? Or is it some motive? Is it evaluative where you're trying to learn what refinements can be made on an existing product of service to drive new change? Number two The roles. What types of customers do you need to bring in our they specialists? Or are they general consumers? An example of a website selling cameras? You may talk to professional photographers who need DSL ours, and are intimately understanding the industry and the vocabulary within the industry or the general consumers, maybe just families that are looking to make a purchase decision and then expand on those rolls off the family that's making a purchase decision. Do they have a camera today, or are they making their first camera purchase ever? And for the professionals are those who are small business owners who make the decisions themselves and then use the cameras that they purchase? Or is a large company such as National Geographic, where those making purchase decisions may not be the ones using the camera and contract making sure that you align with the scope of your research project. You're gonna find that once you expand your talking with a lot of different people, that can take a lot of time and a lot of money to do so. So we're places that we can pull in to save time and to save money, talk with a few less people. But to make sure that we're still gathering enough insight in general themes to drive the innovation to drive that design in the number five, what additional criteria can use just sort of spring? Glenn, I like to think of these as the extremes of the professional camera seekers. Maybe there are those who own many different DSL ours, who maybe even attend weddings with five or six of them. How do they balance between them? And how do they use what camera for what purpose? This could help us drive innovation for change and marketing communications on the website for the experience going at. So once you identify all five of these steps, you're gonna be able to know what customers coming in the room, so you can identify what questions you need to ask to get them there. And that's gonna be your screener in the next lesson. Now for this participant recruitment criteria, you can use a laptop or a computer to identify these different criterium with the five steps that I've identified. But my favorite method is to use sticky notes and a marker. It's easier to change on the fly and to adapt as you go along, and it's easier to share with teams and get by and as well before spending a lot of time I documenting in a computer, Let's dive right. 3. Participant Criteria Part 1: So let's start with the overview. The board. I have my five steps here to help guide me through the blue sticky notes are the methodologies the pink here is gonna be explaining the roles that I'm looking for and then the yellow these are gonna be expanding on those rules. Green is going to be to contract that and then any additional criteria and that's it. That's our board. Okay, so let's start with the methodology. Remember, this is gonna be a study it around a new website for West out. So let's make sure the right west out here now because this is a new website with new criteria. We need to uncover customer mental models around purchase decisions. So we're gonna focus on doing generative interviews anywhere between 12 and 30 interviews here, I think, would be a good fit for this scope. I wanna play set off to the side so we could use that to ground us as we move through the rest of our recruitment criteria. And this is what I really love. Sticky notes. It's just easily there at your fingertips can get started and make changes on the fly. So what are some rules that we need to identify. Well, I'm thinking maybe general consumers, people who just come in looking to make purchase decisions for themselves and their family , I think that'd be a good role to identify here. Okay, what other roles can we think of? Well, I put interior designers maybe people who are specifying furniture on specific projects that they're working on. They'll probably have a different workflow in a different frame of mind and maybe even different criteria they're looking for. Remember general consumers and interior designers, that's gonna be our specialties that we talked about. They're a little bit more new once they have very specific requirement. So we have general consumers. We have specialty interior designers. Those were gonna be the rules that we focus on today. What I'm gonna do here is I'm gonna separate thes pink sticky notes because we're gonna branch off of them with our criteria and you'll see what I'm talking about in a minute. So what I'd like to do here is think about the lenses that you can apply to your criteria to expand them. In this example, I have expanded my lens to think about large and small. How does a large company make purchase decisions like this versus a small company? Maybe there's more stakeholders involved. This is something that I really think could impact in interior designers. Ability to choose furniture for a project. Now let's look at large and small families there. More people involved in that decision and the furniture has to be big enough to accommodate large families, so that might be a large difference as well. Okay, now what else? What other factors might affect purchasing decisions for interior designers or families? What other lenses can we apply here? Coming up with lenses can be tough. Make sure to reference the material listed for this course where I give you a few starters . But really it comes down to the end goal and what we're trying to learn about his purchase decisions in the context of our specialist interior designers, maybe there are different purchasing decisions or more hoops to jump through in commercial interior design versus residential interior design. What types of stuff do they look for in residential projects versus commercial projects? So split it out here and again. Our idea is to expand, So let's talk to six commercial interior designers and six residential interior designers as well. I'm gonna apply this and what I'm gonna do is like I mentioned, we're gonna be branching off here. So really, we need to talk with six commercial and six residential interior designers from a large company and six commercial and six residential interior designers from smaller companies. This will really give us an understanding of their purchase decisions in a corporate or commercial setting in a residential setting and how the size of their business might even affect those decisions. Maybe there's more stakeholders involved. There's more red tape, and in this case, you can see that I've doubled my sampling. So I'm gonna go in here, going across out six, and I'm gonna write 12. Now we have 24 different interior designers that were talking with from large and small companies from commercial and residential interior design 4. Participant Criteria Part 2: So what about generalised consumers? How could we expand that criteria to really look at folks that need to talk to in order to make sure we're getting diverse perspective. So what I've done here is I've identified that lens of size again, and I've applied that to the actual home itself. The square footage. How does that affect the type of furniture that you can not only fit but that a larger small family uses? And again, we're expanding here. We're talking with general consumers with a range of different backgrounds and family Leo Dynamics. So we want to make sure we talked with a lot of them so that we get those diverse perspectives. As if doubling our sample once wasn't enough, I'm gonna do it again and apply another lens of income as that would vastly affect purchase decisions made by a family. I have identified different income brackets and have applied 12 different families teach. All right, let's see what we got here. We're talking with 72 different people, general consumers and interior designers alike. This is just not gonna fly on an average project. He wouldn't have the time and perhaps not the budget in order to do so. Now it's time to contract grabber green stickies and let's look where we can pull in in order to make this project a little bit more realistic for us. Let's bring in the scope. So let's first visit our consumers. I'm gonna pull back the family size. Let's start with four large families and four small families. Yeah, after thinking a little bit, this might just not be enough. When we look at dividing small and large homes, let's make that eight. That's why I love sticking notes. They're so easy to change up if you need to. So now let's do four small homes and four large homes within those eight. So of those eight people were talking to four of each had seems a little bit more manageable. It's only 16 people because their general consumers with various different backgrounds this seems to make a lot of sense. So, lastly, what I'm gonna do here is I'm gonna look at the income bracket, and I'm just going to scrape that down. Let's just get four of each. I think that's pretty manageable. Within 16. People were talking and that's it. I'm gonna continue doing this, I'm gonna show you my final product, including any additional criteria that I have identified as well. And here we are. This is what I ended up with by identifying the goals of the methodology, the roles involved, expanding on those roles and then contracting again. Now we're talking with 24 total participants, 16 general consumers and eight interior designers. I feel like we ended up with a really great set. In the next lesson, I'm gonna show you how to take this and design questions in order to get these types of people in the room. 5. Screening Questionnaire Part 1: now here is the part that's really crucial in making sure they get there, identifying the questions that you need to ask and crafting them in a way in which is not leading, not obvious, and helps people self identified. And so I've built a template that you can use within this course for a participant screener . This should be really easy to plug and play with your own screening questions. And for the purposes of this course, I've already built the participants screener based on the criteria we saw in the previous lesson. So I'm just simply gonna walk through how I made some of the decisions that I did, why I made them and how you can make decisions of your own moving forward table of contents . Now a screener can get quite long. We want to make sure that people can easily find this the crude mint criteria, an introduction. If you were doing phone interviews yourself, what do you say? How do you say it? Consumer screening questions and in the interior designer screening questions, it's really important to highlight that if you have two completely different roles, they might need different screeners scrolling down one of the things that I always start my criteria with is three explanation of the project and before diving right into the questions, I think it's really important to highlight the criteria below as well. I've not only added what we did in our board, but I've also expanded on a little bit. Now what I've done here is I've identified what is a large family mean? And now if you remember that branching technique that we did in our boards, so what I've done here is I've branched off just using some bullets, so it's easy to follow. And then I further identified that as well. What is a large home and what is a small home? Me four need to be in large homes and four need to be in small homes. It's the same thing we did in our board and then, Lastly, I have identified an additional family dynamic here. This is that green sticky that we used to identify any out wires and now eligible interior design participants should be screened by the following. And again, we've outlined eight different total non digital designer and non researcher participants as very, very important to say non digital here because, of course, we are looking for designers. You want an even split of male and female and ethnicities just like we did before and job status. We want to make sure that they're working full time, but they're embedded in the team and that they're part of making these purchase decisions. And finally, any additional designer dynamics Now, the introduction script. I won't get into too much detail here, but really, you should open with a nice, warm hello. Remind that it's not a sales call. You're not a Tele marker and clearly outlined the requirements up front. Make sure you clearly identify how much you're gonna be offering them. In this case, I said $100 gift card. Now let's go into screening questions Now. In general, what I do is a best practice is I start with general questions. These air usually demographics. The ages, the genders, ethnicities. This is all something that a lot of vendors and a lot of platforms already have in their database. And as you're defining your questions, it's extremely important to make sure that you're telling a story. You're going from broad, too narrow. So here we started brought. We talked about gender. In this case, I say, observed most databases and most vendors that you may be working with well, know the gender. How old are you now? The way that this screener is set up, if you notice it leads with a question followed by the number here within this template and then in the orange, it says, recruit a mix. All participants should be between 20 and 55 years old. So it clearly says it doesn't really matter who we get, but they have to be between 2055. And as you can see the criteria that are laid down below, we have a box to the left in the criteria to the right. So as I'm going through and screening participants who could be eligible for the study, I'm tallying up these votes, and I know whether or not they are are not qualified. We then open it up to education, talk about their occupational status. Now, in this particular question, if you're able to ask over the phone, then you would just simply ask, What is your yearly income? Once you reached four in one category, then you would no longer screen people live, and especially depending on how strict your criteria are, it's important to outline what's required for the study and what's a nice to have Now. Here's a really important question that really gets at screening in participants who are not in digital design or user research in order to make sure we're not biasing. Our participants were not leading them towards the answer that we're looking for. We've asked the question by outlying a bunch of different possibilities. So we offer a plethora of different industries, and we've identified which ones we would terminate. 6. Screening Questionnaire Part 2: Now we get into the details. I like to separate. What are the details from what are the general questions in any screening questionnaire? It just helps me scroll quickly down to see those specific, detailed criteria that we absolutely need. I asked him, Do you have Children? And if so, how many Children do you have? Not saying? Do you have Children? Yes. No. If I would have just left it up to 50 50 chance they have a 50 50 chance of getting it right if they're trying to game the system. And I stress this has never happened in my experience, but I do know that people do it. Think about it's a conference call or 30 or 60 minute Web conference that you could make 100 and 50 bucks. So let's make sure that we're getting the right people in the room. So we get the right perspectives not offering that 50 50 chance. I think it's important here to outline that if you're using a platform, then you may have to provide all of these answers in multiple choice questions. So that way someone could fill it out because then a screener is no longer in a phone interview as we're going through here, but it's actually an online form now. I want to scroll down here because I think this is really important. In some instances when we have this branching technique, we reference previous criteria. So in this case we referenced the large families in the small families, which we asked above. Now, why is this important? Because when someone is looking to recruit eight people who have 1 to 3 bedrooms, you have to remember that you're recruiting for the large home and the small home. It's extremely important to make sure that you can reference any branching in your criteria during each question. Now, much of the same rules are applied to the interior design screening questions. So I won't go much into detail, especially within the general bit here. But if we scroll down to the details, we've told them to recruit from large and small companies, large company brackets or flexible in this case when defining my question, I've expanded even Mawr because I identified a large company from an enterprise company. But I did say aim for two, and that is a clear indication that if I get four of these participants within 300 to 1000 employees, not a big deal. Now, in this question, what I wanted to point out is, if we ask within the role and the responsibilities, I'm giving them a list of different responsibilities. But again, I'm giving them many different options. What they have to fill out is F f and E specifications that includes furniture, specifications. And finally, after your screening questions, you have a reject and accept script. This is really important to keep in front of you. If you're the one on the phone call making those calls, because if they don't meet a criteria or if you've already filled a quota, then you need to reject them. And if you accept, make sure you again outlined the requirements in K State for gotten outlined. What they'd be getting. Let them know that the data collected will be for internal purposes only. Let them know that your name and personal information will be kept completely confidential . Let them know that they can schedule an appointment on what day and at what time, Ask them if a day is available and then choose the time. One thing to know if you're using a platform. A lot of times it's driven by your schedule and you can put your schedule within the platform and that's it. That's the screening questionnaire. In a nutshell. We've gone through the questions, how to craft your questions to that way. They're not obvious. They're not leaving themselves up to chance. And you're not leading participants in an era you want them to go. We talked about terminating and making sure that's important to highlight what would terminate a participant and what would allow them to be screened in. We talked about being able to look at a range of criteria, maybe just opening the quota. So that way it's not so strict. And we talked about strict quarters when you absolutely need a certain type of person. So you say, I need to of this and two of that versus a range. And we talked about, as we see here, the importance of outlining any branching criteria. So that way you can reference this as you go along. I hope that this overview was helpful. You can find this template in the project materials, and in the next lesson we're gonna talk about how to put this to good use, either in a platform or when using a vendor in order to administer your participants screener. 7. Administering Screeners: Now it's time to administer your screener. Administering your screener can be a little bit difficult to learn where it is. You should start. So I've identified. Several different methods were not gonna dive in detail in each of these methods, but I want to give you the tools you need to at least know where to begin. There's a lot of different documentation out there on how to recruit participants specifically after you've prayed that your criteria and your screener. So I'll be talking about a range of methods that you can take and use on your own research projects Now I wanted to extend our example by keeping consistent with our West own redesign study. Let's dive into free methods so you can administer your screen or on a number of different websites, blog's and forums. Here we can look at our interior designers and Craigslist jobs are linked in a great opportunities. Craigslist jobs are also great for general consumers. LinkedIn is fantastic for your specialists because you can verify that they actually work. In Field House is an interior design specific website that has a blogger forum that you could potentially post on, and I would highly recommend Facebook groups were even looking on instagram or Twitter. You can even use the West Elm website itself. If they were your client in this case, and you're recruiting a research study for them, you could even use their own cider block to post internal advertisements. Or, for direct consumers may be just directly email their existing list of customers. That would be the easiest free method. One of the things to note about using social media It can be quite time consuming, so you have to make sure you have a good amount of time blocked off, and that's your primary focus that week is to file. Follow people on Facebook, find them on Instagram and find them on Twitter. An example that I've pulled up here is where I've joined a Facebook group for interior designers, and I'm posting here to the group. It's so easy to just copy and paste your screen, your questions and your answers into a Google form so you can easily share it out. That's also free. Ensure your post is an exciting incentivizing and highlights how easy it is to get started . Advertisement. You get administrator screener using advertising on social websites or even Google ads, so you can target websites that specialists or even your general consumers, may be going to. Maybe your general consumers are going to a number of different furniture websites you can advertise. There may be your interior Designers are following specific blocks. You can advertise their An example of an ad campaign here and Google ads really shows you how you can dive deep into the different interests and habits that your customers may have . The's platforms a wire to drill down by demographics and cycle graphics to make sure you're getting the right people, and this directly relates to your screener. Make sure you have a nice visual. If you're planning to use display or instagram ads, for example, and platforms, you could administer your screen or through various online platforms that not only specializing participant recruiting but also end to end research in certain examples now. So my favorites user zoom and user tastic, where you pull from their large panel of participants in order to get them in the room. One tip here you have to keep them in the platform. You can't bring them out. You can't contact them on your own. They remain within the user zoom and user testing platform because they're part of the panel responding to user interviews. Use public information like linked in profiles for validating special specialties. And hot jar and ethnic are fantastic for getting a read on your existing customers who are actually visiting your website. I highly recommend those as well. Most platforms have digital screener inputs. Here's an example of user testing. Simply copy and paste what you've already created. An add additional criteria as well in vendors. Now this is something that I use a lot. This is a lot of times for in person studies or when you need to go in someone's home, for example, and these can be quite expensive. But they also can be really hassle free as you get a dedicated project manager who works with you every step of the way by administering your screener, following up with participants to ensure that they show up on time. You know, we've talked a lot about different methodologies for administering your screener. I wanted to leave you with a few tips and tricks on how much you should pay participants. It really comes down to three things specialty it, which you'd like time, which you need them in the attendance. And what I mean by attendance is Do they have to jump on a phone call, a Web conference, come in person or you going into their home pretty much in that order. The cost increases. You could really get away with a Web conference for 50 to $80 for an average consumer, maybe $100 for a specialist. Now, if you need to bring them in the room, I would suggest starting at $100. I always do suggest starting a little bit lower and seeing if you get participants in the room, because you can always increase incentive as you go along. If you have a really urgent project, I highly recommend you start high because people will be more incentivized to be able not only to answer your screening questionnaire but also to show up on time. And that's it. That's the high level overview of everything that I wanted to walk through a Sfar as administering your screener. We've done a lot of work to this point, so these air just a starting point to give you the tools that you need in order to continue and administer your screening questionnaire. Now each of the vendors in each of the platforms that I've listed here have links to their websites. I highly encourage you to click through those links and learn more about them and the services they offer. 8. Your Class Project: All right, Now it's time for your class project in this class project. No surprise. You're gonna be creating your own participants, screener, with your criteria and a strategy for how you plan to administer your screen. Now, why you go long? I'd like to you to think about what types of people do you need to talk to identify the roles, expand on those roles and then contract again making sure that you keep your research within scope. I'd like to see something around 12 to 30 people at the absolute most. And then what are your screening questions? How are you going to craft your questions? So that way they're not obvious your screening out people that may not want to talk to and you're not leaving it up to chance? Finally. What's your strategy for administering your screener? Are you going to use a free blawg for him? Are you gonna post advertisements or you gonna use a vendor? And if so, what websites will you use? What blocks? What vendor will use? Be specific. Be detailed and be sure to share along the way. I think of it is sharing after you create your first initial criteria. And then after you create your screening questions, making sure to get feedback along the way from other students, and then finally, your final project. Once you have all three of them together your criteria, your questions and your strategy for administration, good luck. Have fun and thank you so much.