Abstract
An often overlooked aspect of usability testing methodology is participant recruitment. Traditionally, test participants have either been independent users recruited by usability programs irrespective of their employer or they have been company representatives provided by product management or a sales team. However, there are drawbacks associated with these types of recruitment programs, which led our organizations at Oracle to create a standardized program of customer recruitment, instead. In this paper we describe the problems that we encountered when using the traditional methods of recruitment, how a new legal document and a customer recruiting process solved those problems, and what ethical considerations need to be made when recruiting customers.
Chapter PDF
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct, http://www.acm.org/about/code-of-ethics
Bartek, V., Cheatham, D.: Experience Remote Usability Testing, Part 1. In: IBM Developer Works (2003), http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/web/library/wa-rmusts1/
Burmeister, O.: HCI Professionalism: Ethical Concerns in Usability Engineering. In: CRPIT 2000 Selected Papers from the 2nd Australian Institute of Computer Ethics Conference (AICE 2000), pp. 11–17. ACS, Canberra (2001)
Dumas, J.S., Fox, J.E.: Usability Testing: Current Practice and Future Directions. In: Sears, A., Jacko, J. (eds.) The Human-Computer Interaction Handbook: Fundamentals, Evolving Technologies, and Emerging Applications, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, New York (2008)
Dumas, J., Redish, J.: A practical guide to usability testing. Intellect Books, Portland (1994)
Minocha, S., Tzanidou, E.: Ethics in usability engineering. In: 2010/Interaction Design for International Development, pp. 20–24. Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay India (2010)
Molich, R., Laurel, C., Snyder, C., Quesenbery, W., Wilson, C.: Ethics in HCI. In: CHI 2001 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 217–218. ACM Press, New York (2001)
Sova, D., Nielsen, N.: How to recruit participants for usability studies (2003), http://media.nngroup.com/media/reports/free/How_To_Recruit_Participants_for_Usability_Studies.pdf
UPA Code of Professional Conduct (2005), http://ethics.iit.edu/ecodes/node/3139
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Greenwood, K., Johnston, A. (2013). Customer Recruitment: Ethical, Legal and Practical Issues. In: Marcus, A. (eds) Design, User Experience, and Usability. Design Philosophy, Methods, and Tools. DUXU 2013. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 8012. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-39229-0_30
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-39229-0_30
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-39228-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-39229-0
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)