Participants have needs
First published January 2018, on Medium
This blog post is the result of a People Thinking project with Nic Price
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What’s it like to be a user research participant?
This is a question we (Ben Cubbon and Nic Price) asked ourselves. And it became clear we didn’t know the answer.
So we kicked off a discovery to better understand the participant experience.
Our hypothesis was that by better understand the needs that participants have when taking part in research, we will be able to improve the design of our research, which will lead to better quality insights.
In addition to gaining better insights, we felt that by showing what research is like from the participant’s point of view we could promote a shared understanding of what research is across multi-disciplinary teams.
The participant journey is much more than just the research day.
To understand the research participant experience, we:
Conducted 5 in-depth interviews with participants
Spent a day observing a participant recruitment team
Surveyed 903 research participants
Through this we discovered the participant’s journey starts when they encounter an opportunity to take part in research. The journey doesn’t finish until days after the actual research session. You can read up on the needs we discovered.
Take part in a qualitative research interview task model
We shared the findings of this discovery at UX Bristol 2017. At the workshop we said we would be going into Alpha, and that time has now come.
Improving the participant experience
This is the beginning of taking the participant experience into Alpha where we will be testing out the following hypotheses that we came out of discovery with:
If we describe what user research is, and what the different research formats are, to potential participants then more people are likely to take part in research and feel less anxious when they do
If we provide a mechanism for participants and researchers to communicate after a research session has finished then better insights will be gathered by the research team, and participants will feel like their input has more value
If we inform user researchers of the biases and limitations that a research format can place on a participant then user research will use multiple formats when conducting research which will increase the diversity of participants and improve the quality of the insights for a project
