Jon Nakasone — Tue, 06 Feb 2007 19:41:01 GMT

With the cost of gas these days, it can be difficult getting anyone into their cars for anything other than cash. I have no issues with this, but the problem has always been with finding the appropriate compensation amount for tests of varying sunstance. For instance, there are times when a usability test may last 90-minutes and dive deeply into multiple tasks, etc. Other times, we need to quickly test users (30-minutes) on a single (yet mission-critical) bit of interaction. In both cases users had to travel the same distance and expend the same amount of fuel. The only variant was the amount of time spent with actual test partcipation. Is it fair to compensate the 30-minute test subject the same as the 90-minute test subject?

My experience has been that compensating test subjects for varying lengths of tests is akin to buying a sofa set. A loveseat, though fully 1/3 smaller than a couch, is just a wee bit cheaper. This is because it’s the ends of each piece (round-trip transportation) that are costly to make, not the cushion space between them.

Boxes and Arrows: Comments by Jon Nakasone