Adaptive Path Blog

When Nate Bolt of Bolt | Peters first came to me when I was an information architect at PeopleSoft suggesting we do online recruiting for our user studies, I was skeptical. I had always recruited users using a recruiting agency. It was a painful process, but one that I was familiar with, and therefore comfortable with.

But Nate showed us the joy that is online recruiting, catching people while they are in their passionate task. As the team at Bolt | Peters worked with Ethnio software, it became a joy to do recruiting. My fellow researchers and I would sit around the computer screen, watching the results of the screener survey come through. We’d pick and chose who we thought would be a good subject. Recruiting had become fun.

When Andy and I got to the point in the Second Life project to recruit users, I went in with high hopes. We got a list of recommended users from Linden, all of whom were very insightful. But Linden didn’t have a stash of new users in their back pocket to recommend to us. So, Andy and I decided we’d hang out in “newbie” areas and find folks to talk to. It would be a snap.

Boy, were we wrong. I spent hours walking up to people, checking their profile to see how “old” they were, and then IMing them my pick-up line. “Hi, I’m working on a project to improve Second Life. Do you have a half hour to help me out?” I was surprised at the number of people who turned me down. They were about to log off. They weren’t interested. They completely ignored me. I felt like the market researches that hang out in malls asking passer-bys if they’d like to take a survey.

Why was it so easy to get people using Ethnio’s recruiting tool, yet so hard to find people in world? I’ve been thinking a lot about the differences in experiences and why they were different. I think first, in world we were coming up to people cold. With the Ethnio recruiting, people had filled out a survey first saying they were interested in participating in the study. We were essentially doing the recruiting survey by talking to folks.

I also realized that what I was asking probably sounded fishy to folks. I was looking for people who have only been in world a month or two. They aren’t real secure in what they are doing in world. I was asking for a ½ hour of their time, and to call a 1-800 number and talk to a stranger. There’s a fair bit of distrust in the world, especially for new folks as they learn the ropes. Perhaps asking them to join the study without establishing any trust ahead of time was just too much for some.

The folks that we did get to talk with us were great. But if I were to do recruiting in world again, I would approach it differently. I think I would advertise the study as an event that people who were motivated to participate could come to. It wouldn’t quite be the same as getting them in the middle of their passionate task, but I think it would be more efficient. And it would help establish me as a legitimate researcher, not someone who is working a scam.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 9th, 2007 at 12:22 pm and is filed under Second Life Case Study. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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