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Recruiting the right participants is important to test your projects properly, but it's essential that your research participants are able to represent your target group, or the results won't translate into something you can use. Since recruiting for specific criteria can be time-consuming, follow these considerations that should make getting these types of user participants easier.
Sharply Define Recruitment Topic Criteria
There needs to be a required criteria before you try to find user participants. Otherwise, your user participants may not be right for the job. Consider general insights like location, age, experience with a certain type of widely used products (computers or laptops). Research recruiting participants by defining your targets more for better data. For example, if you're working on an app that streamlines food reviews, you should find people who have used other similar apps or are food review critics or bloggers.
Figure Out Who You Want as a User Participant
After defining your recruitment topic, start recruiting user participants that will benefit the most from the project. They may have characteristics that are broad or narrow, depending on the nature of the project. On occasions, usability tests are carried out with employees from a related business, but its more likely a bias will occur with people you know. To deliver desired results, it's better to find user participants you have no relationship with. In general, recruitment should be done from the general requirements based on personal attributes such as race, age, or income bracket to achieve the best results.
How to Recruit
There are multiple ways to recruit participants, such as a recruitment agency. These agencies are efficient because they find participants for you based on your criteria, but they can be costly for small businesses. Suppose you don't have the funds for an agency. In that case, you consider other opportunities such as advertising on social platforms (see this guide on recruiting research participants via Facebook), using your network, or reaching out to friends and family who know people that aren't in your social circle. You can make recruitment more manageable by setting up a time and location that is convenient for your local user participants.
Cost of Recruitment
No matter who you hire, they should always receive some sort of compensation for their efforts. Your user participants are taking time out of their life to help you, so they should always receive a reward for their efforts. Compensation will differ greatly depending on how long the research will take and how complicated the task it. You may also need to pay for expenses depending on how long or how far the location is based on the participants' location. If the task takes less than 10 minutes and requires little skill to do, you could offer indirect compensation in the form of a draw for a television, or a Starbucks gift card.
Main Takeaways
To get valuable results for your project, it's essential to set the project's expectations before gathering a group of user participants because it can cost you time and money that you don't have. When the criteria is too general, such as relying only on age or location, recruitment is easy, but the data may not be good enough for your project. Keep in mind that regardless of the project's length or scope, the research stage may take longer than expected. Always prepare for more extended sessions than initial stated, and always keep accessibility issues and user disabilities in mind when preparing to test your project.
