Bad recruits kill studies. Nielsen Norman Group's latest piece opens with a concrete failure case: a fitness tool study where participants had no interest in fitness, producing scattered data and zero actionable clarity. The cost is not just wasted sessions. It is a compromised research plan that cannot answer the original question.
The article argues that selection criteria must go beyond demographics. Defining who is in, who is out, and how to maintain diversity across a participant pool are three distinct tasks, and conflating them is where most teams go wrong. NNG frames this as a prerequisite, not a recruiting afterthought.
The full piece is worth reading for its operational specifics: how to write inclusion and exclusion criteria that map directly to your research questions, and how to avoid the pattern where a flawed screener produces participants who technically qualify but are practically useless. If your team has ever paid someone to leave a session early, this is the process fix.
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