Internal Participants - II

■ To conduct early exploratory research. Internal participants make good exploratory participants as long as they are unfamiliar with the product and meet the target user profile. With early exploratory research,

you are not as concerned with the subtle issues of later validation tests.

Instead, you are more concerned with overarching problems of the product, such as the mental model, primary navigation techniques, organization of documentation, organization and navigation of an online

help system, and so on. Internal participants can quickly help to determine whether you are on the right track, without the expense and time necessary to recruit outside participants.

- To conduct "best case" testing. In "best case" testing, which is often employed at an early stage of development, you see how someone who is very experienced and more familiar with the culture (i.e., a ringer) uses the product. The idea is that if this best case user has trouble, you have serious design problems. In some cases, the internal participant will be more critical than the external participant, more willing to point out problems and not hold back. If the product passes the best case scenario, you should quickly follow with a less experienced end user to verify the soundness of the design. If it does not "pass" the best case

scenario, do not bother with further testing. Instead, head back to the drawing board for further development work before testing again. Of course, in some cases the internal participant is the end user. By all means,

in that case, use them exclusively for your test. For example, in the banking  system example, the banking system may have been developed internally for internal use. The end users are certainly internal to the company.

Finding internal participants may be as straightforward as searching your company directory on the intranet and firing off an email to someone who seems to be in an appropriate position to see if he or she indeed meets the selection criteria. Otherwise, your company's human resources department may be able to direct you to qualified end users in your own organization. For example, if you are working on a product that requires a certain expertise and you cannot use people who are working on the project directly, the human
resources (HR) department or the company intranet can direct you to people within the company who would tend to have the appropriate experience.
You then could call them up yourself, do the screening, and make all the arrangements for using them as participants.
By the way, if you decide to use outside agencies to recruit test participants, the human resources department may want to coordinate that. HR may have already set up relationships with these companies through other people doing research studies in your company of whom you may not be aware.