Six Tips for Scheduling Participant Interviews!
You’ve screened a great group of participants, and now it’s time to get to the meat of your study: your data-gathering sessions. A careful scheduling strategy is key to creating a smooth experience for researchers, stakeholders and participants so you can concentrate on learning from the people best suited to provide you with input. Below are six great tips and my favorite research study countdown planning guide.
Here’s what years of experience have taught me about scheduling sessions:
1. Over recruit
If you’re conducting a usability test with five people in one segment, you'll want to schedule 7 or 8 people to accommodate for no shows, scheduling conflicts, and people who may not actually qualify even though they passed your screener. By planning for this up front, you save yourself (and your team) from a last-minute scramble to find more people when you come up short. What do you do if the first five show up and are qualified? Give yourself a high five, because it likely won't happen on your next study. TRUST ME. In fact, no-show rates and fraudulent participants have increased since Covid. #truthbomb
2. Three is a magic number
Don't schedule more than three sessions in one day, particularly as a beginning practitioner. The cognitive load is too high. You will become exhausted, and at some point you're going to stop hearing what people say and you'll have to go back and listen to those recordings. A more experienced moderator may be able to handle four or five sessions in a day, but it’s not ideal. I've done five in a day. Am I proud of it? No. Am I wiped out after? Completely.
3. You (and your team) need breaks — schedule them!
Allow at least 30 minutes of buffer time in between your sessions — and much more time for ethnographies. This gives you wiggle room for unpredictable circumstances like late starts, technology issues or verbose participants. And even when things run like clockwork, you’ll still need time for the team to debrief, take a bio break, grab something to eat and so forth. Give yourselves AT LEAST 30 minutes!
4. Mix up your session time offerings
When you contact participants to schedule a session, they typically choose the first available time listed as an option. Keep an eye on your early responses, and once you have a couple of people that have selected that first available time, remove it from your offered appointments. This will help ensure your schedule balances out.
5. Be clear about time differences
People always assume things are in their local time. When you’re setting up sessions with participants in different time zones, list several appointment times including time zone, and repeat the time zone information several times. Be ready to make time conversions for your study participants — it’s ultimately your responsibility to communicate the appointment times clearly. For example, the United States is divided into six time zones: Hawaii-Aleutian, Alaska, Pacific, Mountain, Central and Eastern. And there are actually 15 US states that span more than one time zone! So even for domestic studies, keep a time zone list or time zone calculator handy!
Be aware of how Daylight Savings might impact time differences, too. Individual countries (and certain US states) have different rules for observing (or not observing) Daylight Savings. For instance, New Zealand doesn't observe daylight savings time. So for six months of the year, we're 12 hours ahead, and then for six months of the year, we're 14 hours ahead. Again, check with a time zone converter.
6. Consider cultural differences (big and small)
Be mindful of local holidays and cultural differences. Once I was doing a study with Parisian participants, and one of my study days happened to be on Bastille Day — which is not listed in the typical American calendar. People in certain cultures are not nearly as comfortable talking aloud, and often people will show up with someone else. So you might need to allocate more time to make subjects comfortable with the moderator.
Even within the US, holidays or cultural differences can impact scheduling. For example, you might have trouble scheduling Bostonians on Patriots Day, or scheduling sessions on Wednesday evenings — typically reserved for church activities — in a religiously conservative community.
In some communities (foreign and domestic) people are not as comfortable with technology, and that has an impact because much more time is spent on setting up. So think about who your audience is and whether you're going to need to take extra careful scheduling considerations, set up considerations, or really reduce the complexity of the technology that you're going to use.
More Session Prep Tools and Tips
I love a good checklist for making sure I don’t miss a detail, even on things I’ve done thousands of times like conducting study sessions. This Research Countdown Planner helps me (and my students, stakeholders and participants) stay on track in the lead-up to live study sessions.
This Acronym Decoder includes acronyms that can be slightly different from company to company. It’s handy when you’re planning with stakeholders who speak a slightly different business ‘dialect’ than you.
The Fall ’21 Ask Like A Pro cohort are honing their skills and advancing their research projects in the Orchestrate workshop this week. That means workshop participants are wrapping up their interviews. Shockingly, three student screeners were picked up by an organized crew of professional hustlers. No joke! More on that in an upcoming newsletter. They've rebounded beautifully and sure have terrific stories for their case studies.
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Stay curious,
- Michele and the Curiosity Tank team
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