Recruiting for Research Sessions

Additional disabled user testing needed to be conducted, so we began seeking out participants through various channels.

After failed attempts at recruiting users through various organizations, we decided to use the snowballing method of recruitment where you ask someone you know to connect you to someone they know and so on. We looked closer to home and reached out to our office staff. Our cook, Mr. Dayanand, offered to help us recruit people from his community in ‘Chiragh Dilli’, as well as at a nearby temple where a small community of disabled people beg for alms.

We met, and tested the prototype, with five disabled men and an elderly gentleman with his aunt couple over the course of three sessions. Overall, the sessions were productive and informative, but we did keep encountering one issue: The participants were so taken with the idea that someone would go through the trouble of designing something specifically for their needs that they weren’t critical enough, in our opinion.

One thing that helped us counter this was using a very basic prototype and many things were obviously missing (such as latches, hooks and shelves) or unfinished (such as the WC), which indicated there was room for their feedback.