User testing recruitment – social network style

How to recruit students for user testing at sussex university, the Stuart method.

 

1. go to facebook

2. look at a friend

3. look at their ‘Networks with the most friends’

4. click on the one called ’sussex.uni’ (if they have it) – this will show you all their friends that go to / have gone to or work at sussex uni

 

The most difficult bit is telling if you know or might have met the student from their tiny photo, but we got a really good response.

Rss strain

I used to blog about things people had made/done on the web.

Now most of these things are announced via a blog post – everyone has a blog.

It’s easy for me to see new things via rss and be inspired. It seems more difficult (or just less automated!) for me to find the things i used to blog about before rss was so well delivered. It’s much easier to blog something delivered to your door than to go out onto the big wide scary internet and find original content that inspires you enough to blog it – and even then, the chances are someone beat you to it.

So basically these days the chances are most bloggers are writing a blog post about a blog post. It’s a change, you deal with it, and originality becomes more and more difficult.

If there is a perspective to add to the original post, thats good and becomes part of the community of interlinked bloggers we all know. If your a big blog or blog in a different geo/specialist area giving exposure to a smaller blog it’s probably a v.good thing.

As 20jfg we were part of a digital music panel hosted by musically at the great escape festival in brighton and all of the other panellists spoke of the web media overload/saturation they experience. Just how many rss feeds can you keep track of in your netvibes? How often do you actually check your delicious for that thing you bookmarked and must look at in further detail when you have time? And how can you blog it all ?

On those days when you really just want to give a heads without much more ? You can have your blog, of blogs.

http://www.google.com/reader/

mine with the catchy url

http://www.google.com/reader/shared/03770040989831834500

I think the icon says it best –

Epoch

As part of the skillclouds user research session we discovered there is a very specific time when the majority of students will actually want to access information on their skills, course details and grades – mainly motivated by filling in a CV or application for further study. 

This time of readiness is different in all students, be it for a work placement in the first year, a summer holiday job in the second year, or a to assess which parts of a course to take next. This makes it very difficult to predict.

Bombarding students with information before this can actually prove detrimental. 

My old colleague Pete Gale from Cogapp gave a recent Sussex HCT group presentation showing information from some projects we had been involved with in the health care sector and the aftermath brought up some interesting parallels. 

The readiness to change ruler

Healthcare patients information motivation can be measured on a readiness-to-change ruler, with information being delivered at the point of motivational ‘epoch’.  

After the peak is often too late.

Delivering information before users are ready leads to overexposure and a numbness which reduces the chances of the information having any impact.

 

The same ideas prove true in student motivation. It’s a very difficult thing to predict, so we have an interesting question ;

When are students ready to receive skills information ?