Focus on Characteristics That May Influence Performance

Ascertain all background information that you feel may affect the performance of the participants. This could expand on the classifiers you specified in the screening process. Similarly, to develop screening questions when you are recruiting participants, form questions that focus on behaviors that vou are interested in exploring. For example, in a study for an entertainment news web site, you might collect information about the last time the participant downloaded shows or movies from similar web sites. However, unlike screening, now you can ask more questions about participants that could set a context in which to analyze the performance data from the session. For example, for the test of the entertainment news web site, you could ask about other, similar interests or habits such as magazine purchases or what the last five shows or movies were that participants watched and in what venue.