Find Participants for Your User Research Projects

The process of finding participants for user research is called recruitment, and it’s the number one cause of headaches in research projects! You can encounter problems at several stages of the recruitment process – during set-up, while recruiting, and even on the day. Participants can be difficult to find, and even harder to convince to give you some of their time. Because of this, it can be tempting to cut corners, butif your recruitment is flawed, then everything else that follows in your research project will be flawed, too.

In Chapter 3 of Researching UX: User Research, Emma Howell shows how you can successfully recruit particpants for your research, balancing validity andachievability.

She starts off by showing you how to craft a practical recruitment brief, such as the example shown above. She then moves on to explain how to actually recruit the right people to match the brief  by creating a screener — a set of questions that are designed to figure out how suitable participants are for your project — and how to access the people you'll need to use for your project. She also outlines the incentives that you can use to encourage people to take part. Finally, she covers how to handle no-shows, and how to ensure you comply with data protection law.

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Until next time,
James at SitePoint