I'm going to show you a few of the easiest ways to recruit participants for user experience research. It's important that you know how to recruit, because it is one of the most crucial steps in any UX project. This article will help guide you through what participant recruitment is and who should be recruited for different types of UX projects. We'll also go over criteria for successful recruitment and finish with 8 Pro Tips for Recruiting Participants for a User Research.
IMPORTANT: This article is part of The Complete Guide To UX Research.
Participant recruitment is the process of finding people to take part in user experience research. Participant recruitment can be done through a variety of ways, like print media (newspapers, magazines), online ads (including Facebook and Google Adwords) or flyers posted around town.
This might sound overly complex but you can also start a bit more simple. Think about going through your social media network (Hello LinkedIn!) but also ask the client if they have a network of people who would be relevant to your research study.
You might be wondering, why is the recruiting participants for research study so important?
The answer is that you want to recruit people who are actually going to fit the target groups for your research study.
This might sound silly because it seems like a given but the reality is there are several reasons why this would be important:
So make sure you have a good profile of your potential participants in your usability tests for your research.
If you recruit the wrong type of people, you might not get the right data you need for your research case. This also includes existing users who might be biased.
As to why so many find this to be so difficult, well, there are multiple reasons.
Perhaps your product/service is niche and therefore the general population just can’t offer very many of your target users.
Or, you’ve projected a budget, which means your target audience is also limited.
And of course, there are those that find it difficult to recruit eligible participants because they don't know where to start and what kind of people they should be looking for.
Last but not least: Time. Quite often projects are deadline-driven. Setting up a research plan, creating a prototype, recruiting the right people can take up quite some time.
If you're stuck for ideas, here are eight ways to find participants:
Be sure to include recruitment criteria with your session details so that participants know what they're getting themselves into and can provide more accurate information about their needs, interests, background knowledge, etc.
The best way to ensure you are recruiting and finding the right participants for a study, is to understand the goals of the research. By understanding the goal of the research it's not that hard to figure out who you need to involve in your research process.
Is it a buyer persona, user persona or that one difficult type of customer who can be a pain in the ass?
As you might know the BTNG Research Team are huge fans of creating multiple research-based personas. This can be vital tool to identify the right people for your research projects.
So when you start to find participants - you need to make sure they actually align with the chosen Personas by screening them!
The best way to do this is with a screener survey. During the screening process we can ask them for example about things like how often they use the product - service or website, their history/relationship with the client or any other screening questions.
Although screener surveys are fairly straightforward in concept, there are some common mistakes that can be made, with potential consequences.
The screener survey is a tool to help you find the candidates who are a perfect fit for your study. Giving away the solution early can devalue the screening process and make your research less effective.
Behavioral questions are a great way to find the people you want. For example, ask questions about their attitudes and behaviors towards certain topics or products.
If you're looking for someone with experience in your industry then look for somebody that has prior knowledge of it- meaning they should be able to answer questions on specific subjects related to your study or product.
To make your screener survey pleasant as possible, start with the easy questions and end with more difficult ones. But do prioritize the questions of most importance. Rank them in order of importance.
If you ask participants to answer a lot of hard questions upfront, they might not want to complete your survey at all or find it too tedious.
Before you recruit potential participants for your research panel, you must consider what criteria you need to apply when recruiting so that your participants can provide relevant insights for your project.
Avoid using demographics completely, or, at least, leaving them to the end of the process. Consider using other topics, for example:
Particular behavior you are looking for
Goals that might be important to your potential users:
Habits they might have:
After you define these more significant areas, you can dial in on information like demographics. Generally, however, these are not always helpful to find participants, unless you have particular needs for gender, income, or location.
Don’t have a wide circle? Reach out to people on social media, community platforms like Reddit and Slack.
If you have the budget, you can consider using a tool to find and recruit potential research participants. Expect to pay up to $300 per participant if you require the participants to fit specified criteria.
This is a great option if you don't have the time and resources to recruit participants yourself.
Before choosing which tool, reach out to potential research participants for feedback on what they like or dislike about them (i.e., costs, user interface).
This is a costly method, but one that gets you the right research participants when you need them. For example, for creating a medical app, you might want to recruit people who have had a past medical experience.
There are online solutions which offer a test panel with a pool of +75.000 participants. You can select participants that fall within your target audience demographic and get results within a couple of hours.
Let’s say you know which people you want to target and you want to start scheduling some first interviews. Scheduling can be a tedious process, but luckily this is where a tool like Calendly can make things much easier.
You can set up your own criteria for participants and then add them to a waiting list that will automatically send people in the order they were added. You don’t have to worry about double-booking interviews or forgetting when you need to talk with someone again because Calendly takes care of it all!
Another great thing about scheduling through an online tool is that you can easily create custom messages for each participant, so if one person doesn't show up or isn't interested anymore, you'll still have prewritten responses ready to go.
Calendly also integrates with Google Calendar which means any time a new appointment request comes in on your calendar, the corresponding notification goes out as well.
That's it! You should now have a better idea of how to approach the research participant recruitment process. Now you are ready to get creative with recruiting participants, offer fair incentives, check in with the participants throughout the process, use of online communities and consider using some great tools to assist you throughout the process.
Also make sure to reach out the BTNG Research Team if you have any questions.
You can always schedule a call with one of our experts.
He is the founder of BTNG.studio, certified Design Sprint Facilitator, Sr. UX Designer and Miro Expert.
He's been working as a digital designer in one form or another for over 15 years. In his career, Philip has contributed to the success of organisations such as Adidas, Air France KLM, Financial Times, LEGO, Nationale Nederlanden, Philips, and PWC.
