9 - Recruiting participants

"O ye'll take the high road, and I'll take the low road,
And I'll be in Scotland afore ye." - The Bonnie Banks o' Loch Lomond

User research requires – you guessed it – users.

Whether we’re running an online study or an in-person one, we will need to get a certain number of representative users to volunteer their time to do our tree test.

In some cases, recruiting is easy. We put a study invitation on our high-traffic website, some fraction of visitors click it and do the test, and we're done.

In many cases, however, our job is more difficult. Perhaps we're looking for a certain subset of users. Perhaps we don’t have an existing website to draw traffic. Perhaps our audience is small enough that it’s hard to get enough users to volunteer.

In this chapter, we discuss how to decide which (and how many) participants we need, how to get their attention, and how to persuade them to do our study.

Tree Testing for Websites

9 - Recruiting participants

How many participants?

Different user groups

Using web ads

Using email lists

Using social media

Using commercial panels

Using integrated recruitment tools

Other ways to recruit

Dealing with selection bias

Coordinating audiences and channels

Screening for specific participants

Restricting access with a password

Writing a good invitation

Offering incentives

Recruiting for in-person sessions

Key points