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When is Too Few Too Bad: How Many Participants Should a User Study Have?

When is Too Few Too Bad: How Many Participants Should a User Study Have? [EXPERIMENTAL METHODS] Khai N. Truong UNC Charlotte WHEN IS TOO FEW GetMobile O C T O B E R 2014 | Volume 18, Issue 4 [EXPERIMENTAL METHODS] TOO BAD: Evaluating a system with users is an important part of interactive applications research and development. However, there are many challenges to conducting an effective evaluation. One such challenge is involving an appropriate number of participants in a study. Although the number of participants involved has varied in previously published studies of interactive systems, it does not mean that any value can be used. When too few participants are involved, those studies are often regarded as weak, incomplete, or otherwise invalid. S Photography, (this page) bigstockphoto.com tudies of novel systems sometimes face this problem because evaluators currently may lack access to the envisioned target user population that would exist in the future. Or the evaluators may lack the resources--such as the equipment--that would be needed to recruit a large amount of people to participate as such potential users. Take for example some of the earlier research systems which explored participatory sensing on mobile devices (e.g., [3, 8]) or more recent work on wearable systems (e.g., [2]). In these examples, the http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png ACM SIGMOBILE Mobile Computing and Communications Review Association for Computing Machinery

When is Too Few Too Bad: How Many Participants Should a User Study Have?

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Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery
Copyright
Copyright © 2015 by ACM Inc.
ISSN
1559-1662
DOI
10.1145/2721914.2721925
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

[EXPERIMENTAL METHODS] Khai N. Truong UNC Charlotte WHEN IS TOO FEW GetMobile O C T O B E R 2014 | Volume 18, Issue 4 [EXPERIMENTAL METHODS] TOO BAD: Evaluating a system with users is an important part of interactive applications research and development. However, there are many challenges to conducting an effective evaluation. One such challenge is involving an appropriate number of participants in a study. Although the number of participants involved has varied in previously published studies of interactive systems, it does not mean that any value can be used. When too few participants are involved, those studies are often regarded as weak, incomplete, or otherwise invalid. S Photography, (this page) bigstockphoto.com tudies of novel systems sometimes face this problem because evaluators currently may lack access to the envisioned target user population that would exist in the future. Or the evaluators may lack the resources--such as the equipment--that would be needed to recruit a large amount of people to participate as such potential users. Take for example some of the earlier research systems which explored participatory sensing on mobile devices (e.g., [3, 8]) or more recent work on wearable systems (e.g., [2]). In these examples, the

Journal

ACM SIGMOBILE Mobile Computing and Communications ReviewAssociation for Computing Machinery

Published: Jan 13, 2015

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