Guide to Recruiting Customers for Testing and HCD Research
If you’re like me, you’re getting really tired of hearing the same things from the same customers, recruited customers that is. You’ve probably tried to change the recruitment brief, to change recruitment companies, to go guerilla, but you’re still hearing the same things. It’s tiring, and it’s not helping you get closer to your real customers.
Scroll down for 9 ideas.
I should preface this article with some definitions…
Customer Testing: Taking concepts or prototypes that you have created and testing them with potential customers across a range of personas.
HCD Research: Performing research regarding the behaviours, needs, and desires of potential customers across a range of personas.
In both instances you need to recruit people, defined by your personas, and willing to be brutally open and honest with you. Also free of any biases, and without preconceived ideas about your business, brand, experiences, or product and service.
Getting fresh insights shouldn’t be hard.
Is it still possible to do customer testing and research and get fresh insights? Hell yes, but you need to shift your approach…
Some companies do Customer Testing and HCD Research exceptionally well, and they keep their recruitment and testing techniques as secret as can be. Here are my 9 recommendations (IMHO) for people who want to get closer to their customers, and don’t want to hear the same old things…
1. Be the Customer
This one often surprises me, it’s insane how many people haven’t actually been a customer for their own product or service. Go out and research to buy your own stuff. If it’s a shitty experience it’s simple, fix that first, don’t do any more testing, just fix the bad bits. Or if you want a full overhaul, do customer research from scratch, without your products or services, start on yourselves, the things that you’d use, if it doesn’t pass the sanity filter of a handful of people on the project team, move on.
2. Recruit from the FFF pool
If you want brutal opinions, weird insights into the daily lives of others, or you need to inject some love and affection into your product, hit up your foes, friends, and family. You’ll be surprised at the stories you can learn from the people you thought you knew, or the connections you might form from people you thought were the opposite to you. Recruiting from this pool is cheap, often brutal, and takes some serious preparation to get right. Don’t go into it casually or informally, make it formal, be serious, and you’ll get the answers you’re not expecting to hear.
3. Recruit from Within
If your organisation has more than 1,000 people, it’s a mini-representation of the cultural zeitgeist in itself. Find the people from within your organisation that you’d typically recruit externally for. Often recruitment companies get people who are full-time workers who want to earn a bit more money in their lunch break, so find the ones within that are willing to do this. You’ll need to be wary of bias in this instance, make sure you build the research around an idea or concept, rather than a product or service. Some organisations set up testing databases or use collaboration software like slack to distribute surveys for research or find people who are willing to participate.
4. Recruit at a Conference
If your idea is specific to a topic or subject, and you can tie it into a particular conference, then you have yourself a goldmine of targeted guerilla testing and research. It’s also a good excuse to attend that overseas or interstate conference. Grab a clipboard and hit the conference hall with some gift vouchers or lucrative gifts for participants, conference goers love start-up swag, entice them with pins, hats, t-shirts. Conferences are a dense concentration of experts, speakers, sponsors, competitors, all gathered around a particular thing. What better way to get that customer research done in one fell swoop.
5. Host a Free Event
Rather than spend money on recruitment, buy some soft drinks, beer, and wine and host a free event at your office. Get one of your UX’ers or Service Designers to organise some training or a talk on what’s happening in the industry, throw it up on MeetUp or EventBrite and watch the potential participants roll on in. During the event, have a break to crowdsource some ideas or survey the participants individually. They’re getting free education and drinks, they’ll be more than willing to help out. You’ll also do an excellent job for your companies brand.
6. Head to a University
Students are always willing to get cash or vouchers. They’re also some of the most critical thinkers you can find, that are easy to access, and are at the forefront of what’s going on in the world. Hanging out in the university quad is a bit weird though, think about how you might partner with the university to get some research done, where the university gets something in return, like recruitment opportunities for their students, industry events, access to your other research, beta testing of your product, or other. If you’re undergoing research with students as participants, complete the research on their turf, where they’re comfortable. Large corporate offices are overwhelming enough for adults, so make sure you don’t unintentionally add a bias filter to them, they won’t be as critical if they think you’re an expert on the topic, you want their raw thoughts, nothing filtered.
7. Go to your local Farmers Markets
Political fanatics, gossiping local shop owners, die-hard sustainability campaigners, super wealthy boomers, and more. The local Farmers Markets are a hotbed of information if you look in the right places. Pay the organisers and host a stall, you’d be surprised how many people are willing to come and have a conversation about something, hand out tote bags with your branding on it, tote bags are like gold at Farmers Markets, you always need one. But get ready to listen, some of your participants might be willing to spend an hour or two having a chat, some will just shrug you off like you’re nothing, it really is a hotbed of society. One of my favourite places to undertake research
8. Ask Google or Amazon
We used to buy AdWords on google and A/B test websites, it worked well. These days Google can help in so many more ways, from searching to AdWords to machine learning and the Mechanical Turk (from Amazon) digital research techniques have come a long way. You might find a Medium article on a specific feeling you’re trying to provoke during a customer experience, you might find some research on scents that induce certain types of behaviour, you might find a chatroom for a group of people you’ve found impossible to recruit for. Don’t turn away from Google because you’re afraid of the source you’ll end up with, in this day and age research for inspiration and emergent thinking can come from anywhere and should come from a numerous amount of places. Don’t be scared of Wikipedia either, you’d be surprised at how much you might find.
9. All of the Above
There’s no comprehensive guide to customer research for every scenario, it changes for each and every product or service or experience that you’re trying to test. The best way to approach it is from multiple angles, the best companies in the world don’t skimp on research, or testing, or getting continuous feedback from customers, and you shouldn’t either. Find ways to build research, testing, and feedback into your everyday roles, get closer to your customers daily. Don’t do what all the incumbents are doing, getting comfortable in their ivory towers thinking they’ve still got the hottest product or service out. They definitely don’t buy their own products, because more often than not, they’re shit, and they’re basically sitting ducks waiting to get disrupted.
Now get out there and get some fresh insights!
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