Editors’ note: Lisa Boughton is director at market research firm Angelfish Fieldwork, Cheltenham, U.K.
To put it simply, user experience testing is when you test a certain product or service so that you can improve its usability – so it pretty much does exactly what it says on the tin. The difference between a good usability test and a great one, however, is all down to the respondents. In order to generate the most insightful results, you need to ensure you are reaching out to the people who will give you the answers you need to improve your product. But how exactly do you find these people?
1. Social media
From Instagram and Snapchat to old timers Twitter and Facebook, social media enables people to share and consume information at an incredibly fast rate – which means you can recruit users at a fast rate, too. And because people who use social media tend to be pretty tech savvy, it’s a great recruitment tool for user experience testing as you can be confident you are recruiting respondents who will understand your product. Facebook paid adverts are a great place to start because it allows you to target people based on specific criteria such as age, gender and location. You could also try searching on Twitter and Instagram for relevant hashtags. If you’re after a more professional audience, LinkedIn groups are another great recruitment tool. It’s also worth doing a general online search for your chosen topic – you never know, you might just stumble across a group or forum dedicated to it.
2. Reach out with advertising
Depending on your target audience, advertising on Web sites, blogs, forums or even newspapers and magazines is another great way to recruit for your user experience test. Advertising is an excellent recruitment method because you can choose the right type of advertising to target the right people for your study. Need to source Millennials? Web sites and blogs will be a good place to start. If you’re looking to recruit older generations, print advertising may be your best bet. Wherever you choose to advertise, though, you need to make sure your advert is as attractive as possible to grab people’s attention: make sure it has an image and try to use bullet points to break up the text into bite-size information that’s nice and easy to digest. It’s also worth including information on incentives to tempt as many people as possible to get involved. However, although advertising can be a great method to drum up interest, bear in mind that it can be costly and difficult to measure ROI.
3. Ask participants to refer a friend
A refer a friend system is a sure-fire way to build interest in your user experience test and reach out to like-minded people who have been encouraged to participate by their friends. One of the best things about dealing with participants that have been referred by friends is that they are more likely to be genuine, quality respondents – and because the original participants will have already been qualified and approved to take part, you can generally assume that anyone they refer will be approved, too. Refer a friend schemes usually generate participants who are already keen to get involved so you often won’t need too much of an incentive to encourage them to take part.
4. Recruit respondents via a dedicated panel
Using a panel to recruit for your user experience test is a quick and easy way to reach out to high-quality participants – and the best thing about it is that you know they are actively looking to take part in marketing research so you’ll have a fully engaged audience. Not only are panels a good way to source eager respondents but they are also a really great way to reach participants with very specific criteria who might otherwise be tricky to find. If you don’t have access to a panel of participants there are agencies out there who specialise in exactly that – just remember that all participants, however you recruit them, will still need to be validated to ensure they are right for your particular study.
5. Pick up the phone
Cold calling has a bit of a bad reputation but trust me – it can actually be a really useful tool for recruiting for your user experience tests. Like print advertising, the telephone is another old-school methodology, which means it’s a great way to reach out to people who might not be active online. You don’t have to just use the phone for cold calling, either – you could also call up local facilities in your chosen area such as gyms, cafes and restaurants and ask them to put up posters to build interest in your study and target those that you might not be able to easily reach online. However, as with advertising, this method of recruitment might not always work and it can also be hard to measure the ROI.