Struggling to find UX research participants? Try these 4 approaches before giving up.

Recruiting UX research participants can be challenging — particularly when you’re targeting a narrow demographic or on a tight timeline. With that said, there are several ways in which you can effectively acquire research participants. When paired with a solid screener survey, I’ve found these four approaches to be most successful.

1. Recruiting services

Whether you’re targeting subject matter experts or average consumers, platforms like usertesting.com, userinterviews.com, and userzoom.com provide high quality, reliable recruiting solutions (as well as other sophisticated research tools). These platforms are amongst the most reliable (and most expensive) ways to recruit specific types of participants. They do the heavy lifting for you and weed out fraudulent volunteers.

2. Craigslist

Believe it or not, Craigslist can be an extremely effective way to recruit average people and is a lean approach recommended by Jake Knapp (who pioneered the Google Ventures Design Sprint). I’ve used Craigslist successfully many times, but, to do so, you need to follow a specific template. Craigslist is one of the cheapest ways to conduct user research — though it does come with some risk.