Summary: Know the inherent biases in your recruiting process and avoid them in order to recruit study participants that are representative for your target audience.
Recruiting participants for research studies is a difficult task: you have to attract interested participants, schedule times to meet for the study, remind them to come to the study, and then hope that they do, in fact, remember to come to their scheduled session. To make matters worse, sometimes participants who do show up are not good candidates for the study because they simply do not have relevant life experiences to contribute meaningful feedback or insights, even with their best efforts. Suboptimal study participants negatively affect the quality of your research and of your design decisions.
Screening surveys (also known as “screeners”) are questionnaires that gather information about candidate participants’ experiences to:
In this article we discuss the importance of screening in the user-research recruitment process and how to incorporate it into your recruitment strategy.