Budgets

The budget will be based on the cost of resources available to you, but it'll probably come in three big chunks:

• People's time (including your time and the research team's time)

• Recruiting and incentive costs

• Equipment costs

In my experience, useful times for calculating the duration of a qualitative user research project such as a usability test (including project management time and typical inefficiencies) are roughly as follows:

Task	Time
Preparation for a single research project (for just about anything other than repeated research)	Ten hours
Recruiting and scheduling	Two to three hours per person recruited
Conducting research
Contextual inquiry/task analysis	Five hours per person
Focus groups	Three hours per group
Usability tests	Three hours per participant
Analyzing results
Contextual inquiry/task analysis	Five hours per person
Focus groups	Four hours per group
Usability tests	Two hours per person
Preparing a report for email delivery	Twelve hours
Preparing one-hour presentation based on report	Six hours

Quantitative research, such as surveys and log analysis, will vary greatly in effort based on the complexity of the task and the tools and expertise available. What a good statistician can do in a couple of hours can take days for someone with less training.

Incentive costs are described in detail in Chapter 6, but (as of spring 2003 in San Francisco) they tend to fall around $100 per person per 90-minute session for most research.

Likewise, equipment costs will vary based on how ambitious your research is in terms of documentation and how demanding it is in terms of space. It's possible to spend $5000 a day renting a usability lab for a series of highly documented usability tests, or it can be free if you conduct a focus group in a conference room with a borrowed video camera and the tape of last year's holiday party.