5 tips for recruiting for your remote user research sessions
The need to learn from your users is always constant in a product organization. The Jetty product team wanted to learn how users are first encountering Jetty and our offerings and how they were finding the experience of navigating through our product flow. The option to conduct in-person user research sessions was ruled out due to a global pandemic so we set out to recruit users for remote user research sessions.
Start the recruiting process by defining your target user type and session format
We planned to interview about 10–12 Jetty members and non-members who interacted with Jetty in the past month.
The user research session format
- 45 minutes / session
- Use product demos and interview script
- Use underwriting personas to show a realistic price
- Via Zoom video calls
We pulled the user email lists for both the member cohort and the non-member cohort and sent out an email invite with a Calendly link to sign up for 45-minute time slots. We offered a gift card to incentivize people for participating and the open slots were filled pretty quickly. We took that as an encouraging sign but little did we know, the scheduling was the easy part and a few challenges were ahead of us. Here are 5 things we learned about recruiting for your remote user research sessions:
1. “No-shows” are real
We scheduled 18 sessions over 6 days. 11 of those sessions were “no-shows” and only one of them let us know in advance. You can imagine it doesn’t feel great to get stood up 11 times in 6 days. It was rough, but we tried to be understanding; everyone is trying to manage a busy life. Incentivizing customers may get them excited enough to sign up, but may not be enough for them to actually follow through.
As such, do not exhaust the entire user list on one email invite. Knowing a good portion of the sign-ups won’t show up, segment your user list and send out invites in waves so that you have more users to invite to extra sessions you’ll likely have to set up.
2. Wednesday and Thursday are the worst but Fridays are the best for attendance
People are in the thick of their busy week on Wednesdays and Thursdays. They are more likely to put this kind of extracurricular activity off on those days of the week. We only had one user show up on either of these days out of 9 scheduled sessions. Avoid scheduling sessions in the middle of the week. But Friday saw a 100% attendance rate. We presume people feel more relaxed and are more likely to give their time on Fridays given there is the weekend to look forward to.
3. A shorter lead time is better for attendance
We ended up sending three separate invites to schedule extra sessions to reach our goal of interviewing 10 users. The first invite was sent three days before the first interview session because we thought we would need a few days to get a good number of sign-ups. However, we saw the poorest attendance rate from the first invite.
When we saw that all the spots filled up within a day from the first invite, we shifted our strategy to send an invite one day before the scheduled sessions. We saw a 30% improvement in attendance rate when we shortened the lead time. Allowing more lead time means there is more time for participants to forget about it or to lose interest.
4. It’s difficult to get non-members to give feedback
One of the goals of this user research was to get feedback from non-members (users who interacted with the purchase flow but didn’t complete signing up to Jetty). However, we didn’t get any sign-ups from non-users even though half of our user list were non-members. We even added a disclaimer to our third invite asking only for folks who haven’t signed up to Jetty yet. It didn’t work. There is an intuitive explanation to this reality — the users who haven’t committed to our product are less likely to give us time to talk about their experience.
5. Users may pass the sign-up link around to other people
We had a few sign-ups from folks who were not on our user lists. It seems like our users are trying to hook up their friends with a quick opportunity to get a gift card. There is nothing preventing users from passing around the Calendly sign-up link. Look out for this behavior and try to filter out sessions scheduled by non-listed users if possible.
We hope these tips will help you recruit users more effectively for your next user research sessions. Considering things like lead time from sign up to session and the days of the week for sessions mentioned above can save you time and avoid having to send out many repeating invitations.
