Introduction

Human subjects research is fundamental to advancing human-computer interaction (HCI), as it helps researchers understand user behaviors, needs, and experiences to enhance the design of software products. However, conducting such human-centric studies is often hindered by challenges in participant recruitment, including inefficiencies in finding eligible participants and administrative burdens. Participants are hindered from joining research studies due to logistical, eligibility, communication, or personal barriers that make participation impractical, inaccessible, or unappealing. These barriers not only slow down research progress, but also limit the diversity and representativeness of study participants. To address these issues, we propose ParticipantGuide—a structured label-based approach to enhance participant recruitment through providing key and interpretable information to potential participants. We discuss existing work, present a preliminary design, and provide implications for future research.

Existing Research

EnergyGuide is a labeling program run by US Federal Trade Commision (FTC) where it provides key information regarding the energy use and efficiency in household appliances, such as refrigerators and dishwashers. The label provides an estimate of annual energy cost and electricity use. Through being transparent in key information that helps consumers use to make the purchase decision, it allows them to compare and choose more efficient models. It also incentivizes manufacturing companies to build more energy efficient products.

Nutrition Facts refers to the nutrition label found on packaged foods and beverages. In the US, this is regulated by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Other countries have similar labels with similar designs. Through being transparent on key nutrition information, it helps consumers make healthy decisions. It also incentivizes food companies to make healthier food products.

As demonstrated by the Addressing Challenges in Recruiting Participants workshop from last year’s VL/HCC, recruiting eligible participants presents numerous challenges. However, the workshop demonstrated that establishing clear communication with participants helped encourage their participation in the study. Our work explores a possible design to establish clear communication between researchers and participants.

ParticipantGuide

Like how nutrition labels provide transparency and empower consumers to make informed decisions, we aim to design an approach to provide potential participants with better visibility into human subjects research studies. To achieve this, we propose a standardized label (see Figure 1) that captures relevant information, including compensation, study time, and required effort, in a way prospective participants can easily view key information and make informed decisions on whether to participate.

Compensation recognizes the participant’s time and effort that they put to participate in the study. This is the biggest factor that helps participants decide whether they would participate in a user study or not. Compensating participants also signals respect, where they give something in return for collecting data from participants. To promote transparency, ParticipantGuide will also provide information on how studies with similar study duration and degree of difficulty are getting compensated.

Participants are often busy, as students are filled with academic load and professionals have work obligations. Therefore, it is important to be transparent about the study duration to help users decide whether they could fit the research study into their schedule or not. We believe that being upfront about the study duration would help avoid frustration or dropouts.

It is important for participants to know what to expect, as certain tasks could cause discomfort among participants. Being transparent about this information would help them prepare mentally and reduce anxiety prior to the study. If the study is challenging, they would weigh on other factors, like compensation, to decide whether to participate in a research study or not. This would prevent participants from feeling tricked into something difficult.

Conclusion

ParticipantGuide label will help participants easily find the information that they need when they decide whether to participate in a research study or not. We anticipate that our label will serve a wide spectrum of HCI researchers who employ user studies to advance their work, encompassing areas such as User Experience (UX) Design, computer-supported collaboration, and AR/VR technologies. Through providing more transparency, autonomy, and confidence in choosing studies, we aim to motive diverse participants to be more proactive in partaking in human subjects research. Future efforts will implement and assess the effects of this approach on participant recruitment for human-centric research. We also aim to motivate future work to: (a) design strategies for enhancing diverse participation in research studies and (b) promote the design and evaluation of software systems across users from broader populations. Our efforts will provide an exemplar of how a standardized label could help with recruiting diverse participants for many disciplines.