Conducting user research and usability tests with real participants who match the audiences you’re targeting for your site or application is a perennial challenge. You may not have ready access to the kinds of people who match your target audience profile. You may struggle with coordinating schedules to agree on a time that works for everyone involved. You may find that your participants don’t show up on time—or worse, they don’t show up at all. You may find that if they do show up, they don’t match the kind of customer who’s most likely to use the site, in which case you realize only too late that you won’t be able to use whatever data you collect from the session.

So what can you do to make sure that you’re doing site research with the right users? Here are five easy steps:

Step 1: Define terms and criteria for recruiting
This includes (A) establishing what criteria the participants must meet, from demographic, psychographic, and/or business perspectives, and (B) agreeing on a fair means of incentivizing participants.

Establishing recruiting criteria is important because if you’re testing the usability of a financial services application, you’re going to want to weed out anyone who’s not intended to use that application. Another example: if you’re designing a site intended for use by the elderly, then you want to be sure you’re not recruiting 20-something’s fresh out of college. Standard criteria that often come into play include (A) demographics like age, income, and domestic lifestyle (married? kids?), (B) psychographics like level of expertise with computers or various web technologies and level of knowledge about the subject matter, and (C) business criteria such as whether they’re a current or prospective customer, and if they’re a current customer, how much of the product / service do they purchase or use in a given month/quarter/year? Of course, you may not need all three kinds of criteria. For example, demographics like income and gender may be moot if you’re doing research on a web application that involves scheduling a doctor’s appointment, or checking email.

Defining recruiting terms also involves agreeing on a fair means of incentivizing participants. Incentives are key—don’t be fooled. Your  prospective participants will be polite. They want to be humble. They’ll say they don’t care about money—they merely want to help. But we’ve found that those who really want to help need an incentive for helping. After all, they’re taking time out of their day to spend time traveling to and/or attending a 60-90 minute session talking about something that may or may not interest them (like shopping online for food for a pet ferret)—or worse, something that may easily rile them (navigating an informational site about political candidates).

For example, we recently interviewed people about direct mailing. These people had full-time jobs. Busy lives. One ran a tour guide business in the southeast US. Another ran a high-end print shop in London. Both loathed having to prepare mailing lists for the post office. In fact, both became a little enraged when asked to talk us through the process they follow when preparing their mailing lists, because any small business owner who’s managed his/her own mailing list knows how cumbersome the process can be—never mind not having software that’s easy to use to help speed you through the process. In this case, we were working with very busy people to get their feedback on software that dealt with a process that made them quickly frustrated and downright irate at times. So it’s key to be sensitive to participants and to compensate them for taking time and sharing invaluable insights with you. Fair incentives range anywhere from $50-$100, depending on the time that’s required of the participant and the subject matter. For example, the more time that’s involved, and the more specialized the subject matter, the more participants should be compensated. Another means of incentivizing that works—especially when you need a high number of participants—is the raffle, whereby you decide—for example—that 3 of all participants will be randomly selected to win a 30 Gb Video iPod. The iPod winners are always extremely grateful and quick to volunteer to help you in the future.

Step 2: Decide how to recruit
Whether you’re conducting customer interviews or usability tests, there’s more than one way to recruit participants for your research. Here are three ways that work:

1 – Get official: Hire professionals.
There are various professional outfits that can recruit for you, but be prepared to pay
anywhere from $75-$150 / head for recruiting alone. Other fees typically apply, so be sure to cover all the bases with whatever recruiting firm you may be considering. Pros: a recruiting firm can guarantee that (A) you get participants who match the profile you need and (B) those participants show up on time for your session. A professional recruiter usually has a large database of people who match multiple kinds of demographic and psychographic criteria. Also, the recruiting firm will do most, if not all, of the grunt work, such as screening people and scheduling sessions for you. Cons: Costs. That’s the big con. (!) Another is ensuring you allow enough lead time up front so the recruiter has time to screen and confirm participants. It’s simply not reasonable to reach out to a recruiter on a Monday and expect to have 25 participants confirmed by Tuesday.

2 – Friends and Family
This method is a cost-effective alternative to hiring a professional firm to recruit for you. If you or your company doesn’t already have a database of prospective participants from which to screen and recruit, you can ask friends and family. I’m not talking here about merely your own friends and family, but also their friends and family, and the friends and family of your co-workers. Depending on the client you’re working with, you may find that they’re also glad to give you names of their co-workers, friends, and family members. The trick here is to ensure that any given friend or family member matches the criteria you defined during step 1. For example, if you’re designing an interface for use by kids in grammar school, you won’t be able to ask your grandmother for help.

If you’re working for a client who needs to recruit employees internal to their company, you’ll apply a modification of the friends and family method, something I call the Buddy System. When your client is recruiting for you, have them recruit not merely directly necessarily, but to also delegate their co-workers to recruit on their behalf. We’ve found a much higher show rate if the participant is attending because they heard about it from a buddy of theirs. We’ve heard so often: “Bonnie in accounting told me about this, and Bonnie’s great; I’d do anything for her.” So if your client has the equivalent of a “Bonnie in accounting,” then by all means ask your client to enlist Bonnie to recruit employees.

A related “Friends and Family” scenario is recruiting from your client’s current customer base. In this case, your method for recruiting is practically done: your client hands you a list of people who definitively match some, if not all of the criteria. (They may not match all of the criteria if you also need to recruit prospective customers.) When recruiting your client’s current customers, you want to keep in mind two things: First, keep in mind that you’re asking them to participate so that you can evaluate customer experience in some way. And remember that the recruiting process you involve them in is a part of their customer experience with your client. So be particularly sensitive to their perspectives, questions, and needs throughout recruiting.

Pros: Cost savings: With the Friends and Family method, you avoid recruiting fees (not necessarily costs for incentivizing folks to participate, though!). You get to show off what you do for a living to friends and family. You can cast a wide net. Another great pro: the more you recruit friends and family, the larger your database of potential participants grows over time. You can sometimes get away with incentivizing at a lower cost—or not incentivizing at all, although I do recommend compensating them in some way, however small (like treat them to a cup of coffee). Cons: You may have as many friends as Britney Spears has followers on Twitter, but none or few may match the intended audience of the application you’re evaluating. Also, friends and family have been known to ditch you at the last minute, so you can spend extra time rescheduling or scheduling a replacement.

3 – The Web Two-Oh Way
Use the power of the Internet to recruit. You can do this the Web 2.0 way: Call on the various social sites you belong to—Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Xing, etc. Or you can also serve up an invitation on your website. Of course, there’s always the Web One-Oh Way: you can send a mass email announcing your study and inviting folks to participate. Pros: You can recruit people beyond your network of friends and family, ultimately adding to that network. Cons: It’s not as reliable as having professionals recruit for you, or using the friends and family method.

Step 3: Draft a Screener
Once you decide on the criteria your participants need to meet and how you’re going to recruit them, you’ll need to draft a screener for you or anyone helping you—including professional recruiters—when it comes time to recruit. A screener is a script that’s used by whoever’s recruiting. If one of your criteria is white-collar professional, then your screener will include questions like: “Which term best describes your profession?  (READ LIST) Professional (e.g. Dentist / Lawyer / Financial Analyst / etc.), Clerical / administrative,  Skilled manual (e.g. electrician / hairdresser / mechanic, etc.) (terminate); Semi- or unskilled manual (e.g. Security guard, waitress, etc.) (terminate).” Pros: Screeners ensure that you’re recruiting the right folks. They’re easily used by anyone else if you’re not the one who’s personally recruiting. Cons: They’re really aren’t any cons to having a screener. It takes minimal time to produce one once you have your criteria in place (see step 1, above).

Step 4: Recruit Participants
If someone is recruiting for you, then sit back and wait to hear the updates throughout the recruiting process. If you’re recruiting personally, pick up the phone and start calling the people on your list. Otherwise, send individual emails to those you wish to recruit. If you plan to handle recruiting yourself (including screening, scheduling, and confirming participants), you should plan to spend approximately two hours per participant.

Step 5: Schedule, confirm, and remind participants
Once you have a list of confirmed participants, schedule them at times that work best for them. Send a calendar invitation in case their email program features calendaring. Once they’re scheduled, follow up with phone calls and emails to remind them of the time. We’ve found that two reminders in advance of the date work well to ensure that people remember to show up and arrive on time.

What matters most when recruiting
All of the above five steps are important to consider when recruiting, but at the end of the day, two things are key. Number One – The participants must be representative of your user base. They’ve got to match your target audience. It does you no good to test the usability of a kiosk designed for a university student center with your neighbor who never even went to college. Number Two – Incentivize if you can, however small; the more, the better. Incentivizing practically guarantees that participants show up—and show up on time.

Written by Ashley Annis