Remote recruitment for UX studies

Building a participant pool during COVID-19

We have all heard the refrain “you need to change with the times.” Certainly, the COVID-19 pandemic has required adaption like no time in recent history. Even if you haven’t been personally impacted by the disease, you cannot avoid disruption to your work processes and project plans. This is the first of several articles that will detail how the University of Arizona Libraries has been adjusting to the new times. You will find some tips for other UX professionals faced with similar problems. This article describes how we created a participant pool.

Problem: Limited access to participants

Pre-COVID, the UX team was fortunate to have easy, regular access to library users. We relied on passive in-person recruitment for unmoderated Talk-Back Boards and moderated Tiny Cafe sessions. For both of these methods, participants were library users that were passing by.

Talk-back board, Main Library lobby, two weeks before shift to online

Tiny Cafe session, Main Library lobby, ~1 month before shift to online

With the libraries closing their doors and users staying home, these methods became unavailable for the foreseeable future. We needed a way to recruit potential participants and communicate with them about future online studies.

Solution: Build a Participant Pool

My colleagues Lara Miller and Rebecca Blakiston had been exploring the creation of a participant pool prior to the crisis, but this project became a higher priority when access to participants dried up. The goal of the participant pool was to create a database of potential participants that could be recruited for future research. To do so, we needed to find ways to recruit, organize, and communicate with pool participants.

Participant Recruitment:

The team recruited participants for the pool using an online form. This form was sent to members of the University community via email and Slack. People would indicate their willingness to be contacted for future research by filing out the form.

First page of recruitment signup form

Some online form options are Survey Monkey, Google Forms, and Typeform.

Common online form options

People also answered background questions such as their role at the university. These background questions were used to categorize potential participants into target audience segments.

background question asking participant to indicate their roles at the university

We integrated the recruitment form with Mailchimp, an email marketing and contact management system. This way, the contact and background information collected by the online form was automatically stored in Mailchimp.

Communicating with Participants:

For our team, Mailchimp serves as a way to manage participants’ information and to contact participants by email for specific research projects. We are able to email participants with the appropriate background when we have a specific project using Mailchimp.

Mailchimp logo

One advantage of Mailchimp is that it offers an effective opt-out mechanism for participants that no longer wish to receive emails. For us, we have an unsubscribe option at the end of our emails to the pool.

Example of an email advertising a survey

Mailchimp also tracks the rate that emails are opened by participants along with the rate participants click on links within the emails. This is important information to assess how effective your communication is with participants.

Email tracking for one email sent to participants

Tips for creating recruitment forms

Keep the recruitment form short. Remember that this form is not your only chance to ask background questions. You can ask additional questions when you are recruiting for a specific project in the future. The primary goal of the form should be to entice potential participants to join your pool.

Make a good first impression. A bad first impression might reduce a user’s willingness to participate in future studies. Make sure that your form is a positive experience by pre-testing the form with a few people.

Tips for managing participants in the pool

Automate the process by integrating tools. For example, Typeform and Mailchimp have a way of linking the recruitment form to the participant pool. This way, the participant pool updates automatically in real time as people fill out the form.

Integration between Typeform and Mailchimp

Organize participants into different user groups. This way you can advertise future studies to relevant groups. Mailchimp does this through tagging participants. For us, we used the background questions from the recruitment form to determine how each participant should be tagged. We organized users based on their role at the university.

Some tags we use to categorize our participants in the pool

Tips for communicating with participants

Think about timing. When are participants willing to volunteer their time? When should you email potential participants? If you don’t know the answer to these questions, try out a few possibilities and see what works.

Make it easy for people to leave the pool. The Nielsen Norman group offers some great suggestions on how to do this correctly.

I hope these tips are helpful! We’re only one week into recruiting participants from the pool we built, so we’re still gathering data on response rates for different types of studies.

Feel free to contact Rebecca Blakiston blakisto@arizona.edu or Bob Liu bobliu@arizona.edu if you have any questions. Our team would love to chat about your own participant recruitment process.

The team would like to thank Harvard, NYU, and NC State Libraries for their advice about starting a participant pool.