Recruiting the right people for your UX Research study — and making sure they’re prepared
Part 2 of a 4-step guide on how to gain impactful insights using remote user research
Doing groceries is a part of everyone’s daily life, at Picnic it’s our mission to build a grocery shopping experience which people love to use. To achieve this goal, our User Experience team in Amsterdam is conversing with Picnic users on a weekly basis to uncover their needs and wants, explore design directions and validate assumptions and solutions.
This article is the second part of a 4-step guide on how to get you started with setting up a remote user research practice in your organisation. Each piece will be accompanied by hands-on tips, that we’ve learned along the way at Picnic. Use these links to go straight to any of the other parts:
Next up is making sure you’re able to conduct research with some actual participants. You could either make use of your own database of users or partner up with a recruitment agency, but also don’t worry if both options don’t work for you. At Picnic, we still conduct ad-hoc research with friends, family and our partners — and gained some very valuable feedback by doing so. As long as you’re aware of who you’re speaking with and the side-effects, it can work.
Defining your pool of participants
For any research activity, it is essential to think about who you want to reach. Based on the research questions, think about if you need to select people who have a certain level of experience with your product or service, or if they should still be completely new to it. By talking with more experienced people, you can learn more about their current behaviour, based on their past experiences and habits. By talking with people who are new to the product or service, you’re going to learn more about their first impressions and instinctive attitude. Both can be very valuable, but it’s important to understand the difference.
Automating your scheduling and messaging systems
Let’s say you know which people you want to target and you want to start scheduling some first interview. Scheduling can be a tedious process, but luckily this is where a tool like Calendly can make things much easier. In a scheduling tool like this, you’re able to select a specific date and time, set the desired slot time and create a link which people can use to sign-up for any of the slots that are still available. It’s really that simple!
Next to scheduling, it’s very useful to set up some automated messaging with upcoming participants. First of all, set up a confirmation of the test session that is sent directly after booking a certain slot. By receiving this confirmation, people are able to easily add the event to their personal calendar and, if necessary, cancel the event right from their email or calendar. You want to make it easy for people to cancel on time, so the slot becomes available again for other people to book.
Chances are that people don’t have time to read a 5-page PDF, but are happy to receive a simple email with a cheerful introduction and a short 3-step process on how to prepare
Secondly, it’s helpful to give your participants an information email about what they can expect and how they can prepare for the test. Usually, we sent these 24 hours before their actual session. Make sure to keep the amount of information just right. Chances are that people don’t have time to read a 5-page PDF, but are happy to receive a simple email with a cheerful introduction and a short 3-step process on how to prepare. When conducting user interviews via Lookback, for example, we ask them to download the participate app, make sure to use a headset with microphone and be present around 5 minutes before the slot. Try to formulate the specific preparations that fit the need of your test session in an easily digestible email. If people are able to quickly scan it while sitting on the toilet, it’s probably a good email.
Finally, people are still likely to forget about your sessions so make sure to send them a friendly reminder shortly before the session. In our system, we’ve set up a small text message 15 minutes prior to any session.
By using an automatic messaging system like this, you can let most of the work be done for you and be sure that most users are able to magically appear prepared and on time for your test session. 🪄
💡 4 hands-on tips
- If you’re conducting a usability study, you are already going to gain extensive insights by testing with just 5 participants. When testing with more participants, the effectiveness of the research is likely to quickly drop.
- Don’t recruit too far in advance, I would say one week max. Since people are inherently bad at planning, chances are that you are going to receive many cancellations from people who committed too far in advance.
- Make sure to ask for the participant’s phone number when they sign-up. In the case of people forgetting about the session or having trouble getting started, it can be really helpful to give them a quick call.
- If you’re making use of an automated scheduling and communication tool, make sure to set-up a follow-up email after the test session. We have been using these to ask if participants would like to help us out more often by signing up for our user panel.
Why it’s worth the effort
While it may seem like quite some work, once set up this system works like a charm. A well set up remote user research practice will save you a lot of work in the end. Still it’s likely that you’re going to receive some last-minute cancellations. However, because of the research being remote, you can probably continue working on something else in the comfort of your own (home) office.
That’s it! This is how we try to recruit the right people for our research study and make sure they come in prepared. While we’ve developed this process over the last year, still there’s lots to be improved. Also, since working in UXR naturally means being involved with many many people, you will probably still find yourself being on the phone with people trying to troubleshoot all kinds of (technical) issues. I guess that’s also part of the fun right? 😉
Time to go live! Next up in our series on remote user research is more on how to actually conduct your online UX Research study. Click here to continue reading.
