Recruiting Participants

With the exception of Behavioural Mapping and Surveys, all the ethnographic techniques in this toolkit require the direct participation of our users. We’ve always provided incentives for this, and since 2018 it’s been the policy of Information Services to pay students an hourly rate of £15 for their time. 

In practice, it’s not an hourly rate so much as the amount each fieldwork participant earns. Each session of fieldwork with an individual user takes around one hour: we wouldn’t expect to keep a student for longer than that, and if we only spent 45 minutes with them we would still pay them for the full amount. So it’s straightforward to work out the costs of recruiting students for a UX project - if you require 5 you need to budget £75; if you require 15 students you’ll need £225, and so on. 

The £15 rate does not apply to staff. Staff can be extremely valuable participants in UX fieldwork - academic staff, non-academic staff and indeed our own Information Services staff. We do not pay staff by the session however, as they’re already earning money for their time from their salaries. Needless to say, any staff participation in fieldwork is entirely voluntary and should happen during the staff member’s regular working hours rather than their own time. 

If your project involves recruiting members of the public (as the 2018/19 YorSearch Improvement Project did, for example, as the National Railway Museum shares our catalogue) they should be paid at the same £15 rate as students. 

We’ve tried various methods for recruitment, including postcards on tables in the library, messages on whiteboards, approaching people directly, social media appeals, and emailing students through departmental admins. Of these the latter has been by far the most effective (we once got 300+ applicants for a project which needed around 10) but social media has also worked. 

The emails or social media posts generally include a brief outline of the project, an overview of the techniques to be used, and the reasons why we want student involvement - and of course, the promise of £15 for an hour of their time. 

Since we’ve moved to paying people for their time it’s been no problem to recruit, but do leave time to get everything sorted. The logistics of arranging a date and time, booking a room and so on, especially when there are two members of library staff involved, mean that to get through 5 participants’ worth of fieldwork may take a couple of weeks.

As mentioned above we don’t pay University of York staff for UX sessions as they happen during salaried time, but we’ve not found recruiting academics to be a problem. 

The best approach is to send an email explaining the project and its aims and what would be involved to specific people (rather than a ‘Dear All’ blanket message) and most will say yes. The Academic Liaison Team can help you with both selecting and contacting academics. 

We haven’t at the time of writing asked non-academic, non-Information Services staff to participate in UX fieldwork, but there may well be projects in the future where this is a relevant and useful thing to do - for example, talking to departmental managers, or people from 'Timetabling'.