7 ways to recruit users for testing and discovery phase
We are Movade, and we focus on designing beautiful and useful Dashboards. Couple of useful ways to recruit your interviewees in 2019!
We all know how important the research is. We do know that it’s unwise to build a product without basing on user needs. We all do tests as a part of our iterative development process, right? Oh, and did you know how cool the Design Sprints are when you invite some users to the party?
So let’s establish one thing: getting your user around is pretty much a must while trying to develop a successful product or a service.
If you ever had an opportunity to build a product for specialized persona, the one that’s not easy to meet on every street corner, then you got a sense of what I am talking about. The recruitment process may repugnant to even the most upbeat researcher. Let me just make your life a bit less miserable.
Here are the 7 ways of recruiting users, that we find highly useful in Movade:
#1 Your client’s resources
Sounds simple. It might be if you have a cooperative client. First of all, typically every company starts with some presence on the market, which means they have at least some audience that might be stimulated. How can you do that? Use FB or Google ads to reach them, offer a reward that bases on your product (i.e. discount, early access, coupon). Some rusty newsletter that no-one opens? Try that as well, just make sure you use a catchy topic i.e. “Make an impact — be one of the few testers of our brand new product and make it better”.
Pros
- Fast
- Relatively cheap
- Well-targeted audience
- Qualitative insight
- Helps to find early adopters
Cons
- Doesn’t work with new disruptive products
#2 Professional recruitment agency
This one is pretty obvious and simple. You contact the guys, profile your target group and voila, it’s all set (no, it’s not).
Pros
- Fast
- It’s off your head
Cons
- Expensive or very expensive
- Questionable “quality”
- Formalities #GDPR
- They happen to have problems reaching specialized personas
- “Serial” testers
#3 Temporary employment agency
Not all of you know, but companies like that offer you a recruitment process through their database. Believe me, they have loads of information about potential job seekers, that might be useful in regular UX study.
Pros
- Fast when you are not fussy about a target group
- It’s off your head
- Relatively cheap
Cons
- The recruitment process is quite long
- Respondents are poorly selected (they often agree to take part just to collect a reward)
- Formalities #GDPR
- Respondents are targeted mainly through demographics
#4 Thematic forums & Facebook groups
Crucial when recruiting specialized users. The rule is simple — be present where your user is already. Digital is easy but I believe offline conferences would work as well. Think twice about how to reward these bastards and their high self-esteem.
Tip: Sometimes the uniqueness of being an early tester is worth more than money. Otherwise, prepare a pile of cash.
Tip 2: Use Calendly or any other schedule tool. Part of the logistics will be out of your head.
Pros
- User in his natural habitat
- Possibility of creating a recurring user base
- Potential early adopters
Cons
- “What’s-in-it-for-me” attitude
- Recruitment is very time-consuming at the beginning
- No-shows are above average
- Might be expensive
#5 Job portals (experimental)
Easy, straightforward. There is an order, there is a contractor. What could possibly go wrong?
There should be at least 3 well-known portals in your country/area. Use them and see what happens.
Tip: Add a google form to collect the database automatically. You don’t want to build it manually. Remember to add screening questions. A couple of them, if necessary.
Pros
- Just launch it and see what happens (don’t expect too much)
- You always tried, right?
- Relatively cheap
Cons
- Highly ineffective
- A lot of time for filtering users
#6 Guerilla research (aka Friends & Family)
Some research is better than no research. We sometimes do this at Movade — just ask your colleague to imagine that he is some kind of a user with important context, motivations, needs, goals. A little bit of role-playing.
Of course, you can’t ever, I mean ever, get any final assumptions based on that. It just gives you some clues vs. no clues.
Tip: Ask your friends to ask their friends if someone knows anyone that fits your end-user profile. (six degrees of separation works nicely here)
Pros
- Light speed fast
- It comforts your well-being. In the end, you DID IT.
- Zero additional costs
Cons
- Very fuzzy hypothesis
- Hard to find a person that can really empathize
- You can’t really make a shiny report from that
#7 Your own recruitment service
We’ve been failed dozens of times, so in Movade we decided to build our own recruitment service called Badamy Uslugi (“We are researching services”). Basic idea is that you continuously recruit a user base that might be of use in the future.
Pros
- Your independent user-base
- Your custom user profiling
- It proves to your client that you know stuff
Cons
- Long-term project
- Someone has to be responsible for maintenance
- You still have to catch specific user types
Just do it
If there is one thing to be remembered: make research a habit in your projects, no matter how difficult it seems at the beginning.
Let us know what works best in your organization. I would love to add some new methods here. Write a comment or catch me here: mateusz@movade.com
