People always ask us, “how do you find the people for your projects?”

Figuring out how to identify appropriate people to interview for a project is all-important. For Reading Ahead, we know we need people who are active readers. What constitutes an “active reader?” We’re defining it as people who read books at least three times a week, in multiple locations. We want people who are engaged in the behavior at a level where they will have lots of experiences from which to draw. We also know that we want to look at how people’s behavior changes/doesn’t change/is supported by/is influenced when reading books in print vs. reading eBooks using a device.

When we have established the criteria for participating in the research, we typically use a specialized recruiting company to find people. We write a screener, which has a series of specific questions to identify people who meet our criteria.

Screener excerpt, Reading Ahead project, 2009

Finding the right people can be quite complex, and for some projects, we’ve written screeners that are more than 10 pages long. If we’re looking for people who do activities X and Y, in locations 1, 2, and 3, but have never done activity Z—well, you get the idea!

In this project, the criteria are simpler, and we’ll be doing our own recruiting. In fact, if you’re in the Bay Area and an avid reader or Kindle user, let us know and maybe we can talk with you!

Update: We put together a representative screener that is formal enough to be given to a recruiting firm, even though we aren’t doing that for Reading Ahead. You can download it here.

Tags: amazon, books, client services, consulting, consumer insight, design, design research, eBook, eBook Reader, ethnography, innovation, Kindle, participant screening, project, reading, Reading Ahead, recruiting, research sampling, screener, technology, user research

4 Responses to “Reading Ahead: Figuring out who to talk to”

Over the last two weeks Portigal Consulting has been working on Reading Ahead, a design research project to explore the evolution of books, and reading. We’re blogging every step in the process includingdeciding what type of participants we want, the interview guide, and highlights from the fieldwork [ here and here ]. Coming soon are our earliest hypotheses, and more of the data from the field (including participant photo journals, and participatory design artifacts), leading towards a full

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[...] Reading Ahead: Figuring out who to talk to [...]

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[...] Reading AheadReading AheadReading Ahead: Project LaunchReading Ahead: Secondary Research (part 1)Reading Ahead: Figuring out who to talk toReading Ahead: The Interview GuideReading Ahead: Props For The FieldReading Ahead: First day of [...]

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[...] conducted our own study (Reading Ahead) about the future of the book and digital reading, blogged at length about our process, posted an in-depth narrated presentation of findings and opportunities, [...]

Pingback by All This ChittahChattah | Portigal Consulting year in review, 2009 12.22.09 @ 1:27 pm