• Skip to main content
  • Skip to secondary menu
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer
  • About DNS
  • Subscribe to DNS
  • Advertise with DNS
  • Support DNS
  • Contact DNS

Disability News Service

the country's only news agency specialising in disability issues

  • Home
  • Independent Living
    • Arts, Culture and Sport
    • Crime
    • Education
    • Employment
    • Housing
    • Transport
  • Activism & Campaigning
  • Benefits & Poverty
  • Politics
  • Human Rights
You are here: Home / Archive / Disabled Voices Matter, in Market Research and User Testing

Disabled Voices Matter, in Market Research and User Testing

By Saros Research on 4th October 2013 Category: Archive, News Archive

Listen

sponsoredpost
Posted by Saros Research:
www.sarosresearch.com


What’s YOUR opinion worth, as a consumer, as a disabled person, as a person with ideas and suggestions? It could be worth cash incentives, from researchers who need your input.

Every day new products are brought to market, new advertising campaigns launched, new applications released and strategic decisions made, on thousands of commercial and social questions. Some of these might seem like tiny choices: do we run with the label with the green border or the blue one? Or they could be huge… do we launch this product in the UK or not? Should we create a whole new version of this portal for specific users or not?

All of these decisions need different input, and in many cases that has to come from the ultimate end users or stakeholders in the finished product – they are the ones who are going to make choices as consumers in the end, and if the product fails at that point it’s horrifically expensive. Brands that overlook the need to consult their customers do so at their peril – remember ‘New Coke’? And in today’s hyper-connected world, the backlash is immediate and incalculable.

So this is where market research and user testing comes in, and Saros Research is the UK’s leading portal for members of the public who want to take part and have their say. Recruiting every week for focus groups, accompanied shops, application tests, in-depth interviews, product tests and user reviews, as well as larger exercises like citizen juries and public consultations, the variety is huge. All our events are fairly and ethically run, are genuine and regulated research exercises, and attract generous payments for participants.

Traditionally market research recruitment was often done by word of mouth, and the opportunities it involved were therefore generally limited to those in the know – personal contacts of recruiters and interviewers. This often lead to a dangerous lack of diversity in research samples, because we all tend to mostly know people who are like us in some way, and this was one reason Saros was established in the year 2000 – by a fieldworker who wanted higher standards, and a researcher who felt her clients deserved better participants.

As well as the quality of research issue, Saros believes in the basic fairness of making research opportunities as widely available as possible, so that everyone has a chance of influencing the products and services they use, as well as getting paid very well for doing so. This means no one individual participating more than occasionally, and everyone’s voices getting heard in the end.

It’s important to us that every section of the community is represented in our membership, and we would love more disabled people to join us and apply to take part in our events. In addition to ‘mainstream’ research where the views of disabled people should be a representative part of population as a whole, we also recruit on behalf of a number of brands specifically seeking the input of people with varying impairments for special projects – such as adaptive technology firms, academic researchers, or users of particular medical products (we don’t recruit for medical testing or pharmaceutical research, but for equipment testing, patient information leaflets or packaging, for example).

Signing up is easy and fun and you can register with Saros here. You will need to trust us with a certain amount of personal information needed to match you to the right opportunities, but we are Company Partners of the Market Research Society and registered Information Controllers, we’ll keep it safe till we have the right project for you, and we will never share or use it for any other purpose.

For further information, please see sarosresearch.com or email [email protected].


Company Profile:
Saros Research is the UK’s leading register for participants in paid market research and user testing

Share this post:

TwitterFacebookWhatsAppReddit

Related

‘Muddled’ blue badge reforms ‘are to blame for renewal delays’
6th February 2015
UN debate will be reminder of true inclusive education
6th February 2015
IDS breaks pledge on PIP waiting-times, as tens of thousands still queue for months
30th January 2015

Primary Sidebar

Access

Latest Stories

DPOs ‘shocked and dismayed’ over survey, as government faces threat of legal action

Philippa Day: Secret DWP report reveals errors ‘that led to disabled mum’s death’

Philippa Day: Capita made changes to PIP assessments after young mum’s death

Philippa Day: DWP civil servant denies PIP ‘culture of scepticism’

Silence from police chiefs over face mask exemptions, despite gap in guidance

Call for urgent immigration action over care worker shortage

Documentary exposes hostility… and a need for widespread change in attitudes

Statistics regulator refuses to push DWP over impact of universal credit

Philippa Day: Young mother ‘took her own life after being told to attend PIP assessment’

Philippa Day: DWP phone agent ignored sobbing claimant who later ‘took her own life’

Advice and Information

DWP: The case for the prosecution

Readspeaker

Footer

The International Standard Serial Number for Disability News Service is: ISSN 2398-8924

  • Accessibility Statement
  • Privacy Policy
  • Site map
  • Facebook
  • Twitter

Copyright © 2021 Disability News Service

Site development by A Bright Clear Web