4 Tips to Successfully Recruit for a User Experience Research Plan
Summary: To run an effective UX research plan and avoid delays, focus on strong participant recruitment strategies that maximize reach and engagement:
- Solicit a broad, diverse audience
- Offer compensation
- Utilize in-person events
- Reach out to close contacts if needed
We’re firm believers that you can’t actually “do UX” without talking and testing with users. The biggest impediment to a good user experience research plan is often research participant recruitment. If it doesn’t go well out of the gate, you risk project delays and/or not having a large enough sample size for meaningful results.
To keep your project on schedule and collect the richest insights, it’s important to come out strong when it comes to recruitment. Clients with the most successful user experience research plans do these things.
1. Solicit Participation from a Large and Diverse Audience
The research we’re doing is often intended to inform the design of the website. We want a design that works for your best friends and relative strangers. Soliciting participants from an equally broad audience is important for two reasons:
- It’s a numbers game. Regardless of the organization, only a percentage will opt-in. Make sure you give yourself a good denominator so that you can arrive at that percentage.
- Your sample should represent your traffic. If you only ask the insiders of your organization, you won’t get good data.
Approach the invitation as you would approach the promotion for anything else for your organization. An email is one tool in the toolbox, but we see good success if you can post:
- An announcement on your website
- Through your social channels
- Within your newsletter(s)
2. Offer Gratuity
Sometimes folks feel awkward about offering cash for a good deed, but it absolutely makes a difference. Regardless of the audience, people like to be compensated in some way for their time. Cash typically does best and larger amounts do better than smaller amounts, but offering a gift card, a discounted event attendance, or a charitable donation can also be successful.
And be sure to mention it in your subject lines and headlines. It grabs attention.
3. Leverage In-Person Events for a Captive Audience
For target audiences with particularly difficult schedules, we have had good luck incorporating an in-person event like an annual meeting into our user experience research plan. We can schedule people ahead of time, but we’ve also had success asking folks on the tradeshow floor.
4. Call in Favors When a User Experience Research Plan Needs It
Finally, as a second step or last resort, call in favors from your committed volunteers and contacts. If you’ve tried the steps above and are coming up short, personal outreach sometimes makes the difference.
Sometimes clients want to start here to ensure this important constituency gets a voice. While we want to make sure that your biggest supporters are served by the experiences we’re creating, we also want to find ways to effectively reach the outer circles. If we start with only a small group - again, it’s a numbers game. Not everyone is going to say yes. We’ll only get a percentage of a percentage if we start and stop with this step.
We’re Here to Help
We’re involved in recruitment for user experience research plans every day. Let us help you craft the message and outreach strategy with language that’s proven to engage and get the project off to a strong start. Drop us a line and let us know how we can help.
