How Effective are Incentives for Online Card Sorting?

Unmoderated card sorting tools are a great way to reach a large number of geographically dispersed participants for your card sorting study. With mass emails you can reach a large number of potential participants, but the challenge is getting people to participate in the study. Unfortunately, few people actually open and read these emails, and even fewer take the time to participate in the study.

How do you motivate people to participate?

So how do you motivate people to participate in Web-based card sorting or another type of unmoderated, remote user research study? Incentives! But what type of incentive works best for a mass audience? You can give an incentive to each participant, but with a large number of participants that can be very expensive. And if you give each participant a small incentive of say $5.00, how motivating is that?

A common alternative is using a sweepstakes-style drawing. One of the participants out of hundreds will get a gift card or other incentive. But how effective is this sweepstakes-style incentive in increasing the number of participants? Does it affect the quality of the results by encouraging those who are only interested in the incentive and not in completing the study seriously?  Can you motivate people to participate in a study without any incentive? What are the other variables that affect participation?

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