[:en]Finding interview subjects for research projects can be challenging. When participants are exceptionally hard to find, what’s a researcher to do? Why not try recruiting by intercepting? My team used this approach on a recent project when participants were difficult to locate.
Figure 1. Dana working with a participant in a community center, where she was able to work with participants who were “hanging out” for the evening. (Credit: Center for Civic Design)
Hard-to-Find Participants Walk Among Us
Typically, we focus recruiting on behaviors. For our research needs the people we wanted to talk to do not take part in a desired behavior. Specifically, they don’t vote.
We did street intercepts because we couldn’t figure out a way to find the people we wanted through any conventional recruiting method. How do you recruit on a negative behavior? Or rather, how do you find people who aren’t doing something, especially something they are likely to think they should be doing – so they might lie about it?
It’s not uncommon for retail companies to have mystery shoppers who chat up other people in their stores. The head of Intuit, Scott Cook, instituted followme-home studies long ago, i.e., find someone in a store who is buying your product, have a conversation, invite them into your study, and then see if they’ll let you follow them home and watch as they open, install, configure, and use your stuff for the first time. It’s what Cyd Harrell and Nate Bolt call “in-time recruiting.” The user is in the moment, not just in the market. There’s no question about the motivation.
We wanted to learn about information challenges for people who are eligible, but not voting. This is less about being at the right time and more about being in the right place. We needed to go where these people might be.
The Art of the Intercept
Much of the success of intercepting people to do interviews and testing on the street has to do with how you design your approach.
First, there’s what you look like. We were researchers and we wanted people to understand that intuitively. A couple of things about us made that easy: We’re two middle-class, middle-aged white women wearing sensible shoes and kindly expressions and carrying clipboards. One person asked me if I was a professor at the nearby university. Clothes are important. Props, like clipboards with signs on them and ID badges, are important. Smiling is important.
But also, be comfortable. You may be on your feet for hours. Out in weather. So plan for being warm enough, cool enough, sun-screened enough, keeping in mind that you have to carry everything you need for the day without looking like a bag lady.
In my previous intercept experience, I started by quickly saying something like, “May I ask you a couple of quick questions about X?” But after I watched a pro–a colleague who works for the League of Women Voters registering people to vote–I tried different approaches with different people. But mostly what worked was some variation of:
“Hi. My name is Dana. I’m a researcher and I’d love to ask you a couple of questions about voting and elections.”
There’s something about introducing yourself that gets people to stop and pay attention. However, we ran into plenty of skepticism. So the follow-up often went something like:
“I’m not selling anything. I don’t work for any of the campaigns or parties.I don’t have a petition. I just have a couple of questions. Ok?”
That’s usually all it took.
How to communicate
Know your anticipated study outcomes and the reasons for those assumptions. This makes it easier to be flexible with changing conditions and a varied available population.
- Be ready with any appropriate, quick, and friendly question. You have to be “on” and energized without being freaky.
- Use your own style.
- Cast your question in a culturally acceptable way. Be sensitive to and respectful of ethnic customs and protocol.
- Be inquisitive rather than confrontational.
- Work the researcher angle. People want to help you if they can.
Not everyone wants to help you, though, and some folks just won’t talk to strangers. And of course, hardly anyone qualifies for your study when you’re out in a random pool. For our most recent study, we conducted 55 twenty-minute interviews during a three-week period in which we did one or two days of intercepts in each of four cities. There were days when we stood (or paced) for three or four hours and managed to do only a couple of interviews each.
Reaching your quota
- Give yourself plenty of time.
- Consider setting goals for the day as motivation.
- Don’t expect everyone you approach to say “yes.”
Location, Location, Location
One of the biggest challenges was choosing where to try to intercept people. We wanted people who didn’t vote or voted infrequently. Fortunately, they’re everywhere. But we were pretty sure that there were places where prospective voters were more likely and less likely to be.
We looked for cities with diverse neighborhoods. The next trick was to find the right place within the neighborhood to do our epic hanging around.
You want a place where there is plenty of foot traffic, but not where people are on their way somewhere. Train stations, maybe. Subway stops, not so much. Our greatest success was at a community center one evening. There were a lot of people coming and going for events, but there were also people just hanging out who had time to spend with us and were glad to do it. We had called ahead to ask if it would be permissible for us to be there, if we needed to rent a room, and whether there were any rules we needed to know. When we arrived, the director was delighted to see us, made introductions, and gave us a tour (see Figure 1).
There were also a couple of places where we had handlers or intermediaries. In one neighborhood, a community activist took us around to some of the spaces where she regularly worked with people or groups.
We had general success at or near libraries. A large city library had a lot of foot traffic from the neighboring university, as well as other people from the community. This population mix yielded several qualified candidates for our study.
Choosing a venue
- Cafés and restaurants will be more welcoming, especially if you offer to buy
- something for you and your participants, or if you know the proprietor.
- Intercepting inside a library is not feasible since the venue is too far away from foot traffic.
- What you are doing may be seen as soliciting, which is illegal in some situations. Be sure to check local regulations so as not to violate any laws.
- Colleges may want you to go through their institutional review board (IRB), unless you know the provost or president who can grant approval.
- Community centers can be safe, fun, target-rich environments with a little advance planning.
Guarding Your Personal Safety
This brings us to safety and awareness of your surroundings. We did all of our street intercepts during daylight hours. We conducted separate interviews, but we were usually within viewing range of each other, and when we weren’t, we either checked in first or SMS’d new locations. (I would never try this kind of fieldwork without a cell phone handy.) When we did intercept interviews in the evening we chose indoor locations, such as the community center.
There are people in the general public who would be perfect for your study, but when you see them, they actively avoid you. They turn away, cross the street, or just look down. It is fascinating to be deliberately ignored. When that happened a lot, I took at as a signal that I needed to check myself.
What was my posture like? How was I holding myself? Was the sign for my study showing and readable? Was I showing any signal that I should not be approached? Potential interview subjects will be more receptive to someone who devotes attention to their personal appearance and demeanor.
Safety Tips
- Work in pairs.
- When working outside, work during daylight hours, unless you know the neighborhood to be safe.
- If you decide to separate, agree on a meeting time and place to check in.
- Make sure your cell phone is fully charged.
- Have a plan for emergencies.
Go Where the People Are
Recruiting well for user research is one of the greatest challenges of day-to-day work in experience design. Focusing on behavior makes it easier. How do you find people who are hard to find through the usual channels? We decided to go where our people were: streets, libraries, community centers, churches, malls. Sure enough, there they were. All we had to do was talk to enough strangers.[:zh]为用户研究寻找合适的人选是体验设计中最有难度的日常工作之一。关注行为将使这一工作更容易入手。当您寻找难以寻觅的人时，就到他们出没的地方吧：街道、图书馆、社区中心、教堂或购物中心。通过顺利沟通和确保安全的技巧，可以实现有效的拦截式招募。
文章全文为英文版[:KO]사용자 연구를 위해 인원 모집을 잘 하는 일은 경험 디자인의 일상 업무에서 가장 어려운 일 중 하나입니다. 행동에 집중하면 일이 쉬워집니다. 찾기 어려운 사람들을 찾고 있다면 사람들이 있는 곳으로 가십시오. 길거리, 도서관, 커뮤니티 센터, 교회, 쇼핑몰 등이 그러한 장소입니다. 좋은 소통 기술과 안전 대비책만 있다면 직접 부딪치는 일이 효과적일 수 있습니다.
전체 기사는 영어로만 제공됩니다.[:pt]O recrutamento eficaz de pesquisa de usuário é um dos maiores desafios do trabalho do dia a dia no design de experiência. O foco no comportamento facilita o processo. Quando você está procurando pessoas que são difíceis de serem encontradas, vá até onde elas estão: ruas, bibliotecas, centros comunitários, igrejas e shopping centers. As sugestões para boa comunicação e segurança podem tornar a intercepção eficaz.
O artigo completo está disponível somente em inglês.[:ja]ユーザー調査で十分な数の参加者を集めることは、エクスペリエンスデザイン担当の通常業務の中でも最も困難なもののうちに数えられるが、これは人の行動に目を向けることでやりやすくなる。見つけるのが難しい人を探すには、街中、図書館、コミュニティセンター、教会、ショッピングセンターなど、その人たちが集まる場所に行くと良い。好ましいコミュニケーションの仕方と安全のヒントを守れば、人に声をかけることが有効な手段となり得る。
原文は英語だけになります[:es]Realizar un correcto reclutamiento para una investigación de usuarios es uno de los retos más grandes del trabajo diario en el diseño de experiencia de usuario. Enfocarse en el comportamiento lo facilita aún más. Cuando busque personas difíciles de encontrar, vaya al lugar en el que se encuentran: las calles, las bibliotecas, los centros comunitarios, las iglesias, los centros comerciales. Con datos adecuados para una buena comunicación y seguridad, la entrevista espontánea puede ser efectiva.
La versión completa de este artículo está sólo disponible en ingles[:]
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