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Who indeed? Early on, we need to determine:

• Which group (or groups) of users to target (or to specifically exclude)

• How we will invite them to participate

• What incentive (if any) we’ll offer them for helping us out

Which user groups?

Most websites serve several different types of users. For example, a toy-store site may get a large number of visits from both children (the toy users) and from adults (the toy buyers). If we’re designing the tree for this site, we’ll naturally have to create a structure that works for both types of users.

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For more on user groups, see Different user groups in Chapter 9.

How to recruit?

Anyone who has done user research knows that recruiting always takes a bit longer than expected, so we need to start planning this early.

The two classic ways to recruit for online studies are:

• Email – using lists of existing and/or prospective customers

• Web ads – invitations posted on our website and/or other related sites

Other methods include commercial research panels and crowd-sourcing sites like Amazon Mechanical Turk.

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For more on recruiting methods, see Chapter 9 - Recruiting participants.

Will we offer an incentive?

In most cases, yes. We offer incentives in the vast majority of our studies. Even a modest incentive makes it much easier to get good numbers in a short time, which is a godsend to iterative testing.

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