Customer recruitment: Ethical, legal and practical issues

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. © 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.