2021-09-07 - Recruiting UX

Research Participants: The Hard

Work to Make It Easy

Sept 7, 2021 - Led by Jared Spool

(Note: This session will be on a Tuesday due to the U.S. Labor Day holiday.)
Make it easy to conduct research by building an effective recruitment process.
Effective user research requires us to have people participate in our research sessions.
This makes participant recruitment a critical part of any user research effort.
Yet, too many teams approach this essential part of research like they’re buying office
supplies. They make a shopping list of what they want and try to place an order. This
approach is rarely effective and diminishes the value their research delivers.
Join our team and UX leaders worldwide to discuss how a well-planned and executed
recruitment process can dramatically improve the value of the team’s overall UX work.
We’ll connect how an investment in recruitment delivers the deep understanding about
users that your entire team needs to design great products and services.

2021-09-07 - Recruiting UX Research Participants: The Hard Work to Make It Easy 1

 Before the talk gets started:
How this discussion will go:

20 - 30 minutes short presentation on today's topic.

Remainder of the time will be spent discussing your questions.

Please put your questions in the chat.

Please change your Zoom name to your actual name.

Vincent Ortiz will collect the questions and pick the ones we'll answer today.

Things to keep in mind with Zoom:

If the little Chat pop-ups get distracting, feel free to open the chat window.

Please put your microphone on mute.

If Vincent chooses your question, you can unmute to talk about it with Jared

Zoom's Speaker View will let you keep Jared visible and you'll see what he's
presenting on the screen.

This session is closed captioned.

We will post the recording for this session within a day.

Too many teams start recruiting right before a study starts.

They wait until a specific study has been launched, then they start the recruitment
process.
The sessions need to wait until the participants have been lined up.

They need to find cheap ways to quickly find the people.

Many resort to generic panels that are filled with professional study participants.

The short turn-around time for recruiting participants puts the UX of the product or
service at risk.

2021-09-07 - Recruiting UX Research Participants: The Hard Work to Make It Easy 2

 They offer money for time.

"Would you spend 20 minutes with me if I give you $20?"

This reduces the participant – researcher relationship to being a transaction.

Using a screener for recruiting strangers can hurt the research process.
It lets the professional study takers in.
It's not based on pre-existing relationships.

The value of UX comes from anticipating users' needs and exceeding their
expectations.

The most valuable time in a UX project is the research.

Research done poorly (or not at all) can take the team in the wrong direction.
The most valuable time in UX research is when we're directly interacting with our
users.
Research must be informed by deep interactions with our users.

When teams go cheap on recruiting participants, they diminish the overall value of
the UX.

This is not where teams should be cutting costs.

On the contrary, the investment in recruiting participants pays off big.

Mindset shift: Move from a transactional approach to a relational approach to

recruiting.

Think of the research participants as a partner in our research, design, and

development.
With, not for.

Nothing for us without us.

Partnerships start with relationships.

2021-09-07 - Recruiting UX Research Participants: The Hard Work to Make It Easy 3

 Smart UX research leaders build up long-term relationships with user community
members.
They establish long-term friendships.

Like all great friendships, there's give-and-take.

Most participants aren't interested in the monetary remuneration.

We don't do it to pay people for their time.

We do it to demonstrate we're serious about what they bring.

In many cases, money isn't appropriate.

The better the relationship, the less money remuneration will matter.

Instead, participants are interested in the outcomes.

They have the same interest in the UX outcomes that we have.

They want to see a direct line between their contribution and the outcomes they'll
get.

Having a pool of invested partners who are potential users of the product is incredibly
valuable.
It allows us to have all sorts of conversations.

We can get quick answers to easy questions.

We can arrange to do long-term or longitudinal studies.

We can put together focus-group-like discussions to work out a particular isssue.

We can see the differences between people and their needs.

This allows us to make our designs more nuanced and responsive to a broad
range of users.

We need to find communities of our users.

If these communities don't exist, we'll need to build them ourselves.

2021-09-07 - Recruiting UX Research Participants: The Hard Work to Make It Easy 4

 By using existing relationships, we can expand our network to others they know.
This is a sophisticated form of snowball recruiting.

Participant recruiting is a critical part of our UX research success.

Without great participants, we won't have the research insights we need to deliver
well-designed products and services.

We need to start our recruitment process long before we have our first sessions.

We need to build relationships with potential participants.

Building relationships is a form of research.

We build partnerships with a pool of participants.

Those partnerships will pay off for a long time.

Allows us to have all sorts of conversations.

We learn about our users by understanding what makes each of our partners
unique.

And what common traits they share with other users.

2021-09-07 - Recruiting UX Research Participants: The Hard Work to Make It Easy 5