TABLE OF CONTENTS No matter what the research, there are two things you're always going to be doing: looking for people who will give you the best feedback and asking them questions. These two elements, recruiting and interviewing, make up the backbone of every successful research project, and although some of this information is covered in other chapters, they deserve a chapter of their own.
Even if everything else is perfect, if you get the wrong people to talk about your product, your research can be worse than useless since it gives you confidence in results that don't represent the views and behaviors of your real users. Every product has a target audience, from toasters to missile guidance systems. You need to understand the experience of the people who are actually going to want to use, understand, and buy your product. Anyone else's experience will be of marginal use, or even deceptive. So if you're making a missile guidance system and you invite the North American Toaster Enthusiasts to discuss how it should be improved, you're going to get little feedback that will help you make a product for the Army (and you'll probably end up with a missile that has a 30-second pop-up timer).
The process of finding, inviting, and scheduling the right people for your research is called recruiting, and it consists of three basic steps: determining the target audience, finding representative members of that audience, and convincing them to participate in your research.
Although the details...
