Compensation

Purpose of compensation for user research

Each user has their own perspective and experiences to share. The best way to acknowledge their input is to compensate them; especially when the user is taking time away from work to give us their thoughts.

Here are reasons why compensation is essential:

• not everyone has the luxury of donating their time to your user research project. There may be child care considerations, long commute times, or other reasons where unpaid research is not a high priority.
• people who are able to participate voluntarily generally have time or sufficient income to attend and this leads to poor sampling.
• if you conduct free user research, most people are unlikely to take time off from work to participate. A good question to ask yourself is how likely are you to participate in a one-hour, unpaid interview, where you would have to take time off to travel to their office and provide feedback? Usually that question will illustrate why paying participants will make their effort worthwhile.

However, if it is simply impossible for your team to arrange payment, please review the following guideline on who does or does not get compensated. In this instance, it may be particularly important to run sessions outside work hours or travel to participant’s communities to make research as easy as possible.