We usually pay about $100 per hour for e-commerce user research. It is often for a retailer, and in that case we use gift cards about 50% of the time and cash 50% of the time. For employee research, most companies opt to not provide any incentives, although we try to give some kind of swag.
My experience has been that the monetary amount of incentives does impact behavior. This effect has been written about in the medical literature in terms of conflict of interest in clinical trials. When we have offered higher incentives, it seemed as though a larger proportion of the participants tried to "earn" the incentive by giving us the kinds of answers they thought we wanted. We also seemed to get a higher percentage of professional research participants who go from test to test. This obviously impacts the validity and reliability of the data. When we've assigned homework, such as a diary, to go along with the interview, specifying an amount for completing the homework seemed to result in higher completion rates and more content per entry. When we've tried lower incentives, we've predictably experienced more last minute cancellations, especially around rush hour in larger cities or in bad weather. Paul Bryan Usography (http://www.usography.com) Linked In: http://www.linkedin.com/in/uxexperts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Posted from the new ixda.org http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=46204 ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... disc...@ixda.org Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
