Source, Screen, Select: How to Recruit the Right Research Participants

The participant recruitment process is central to gathering actionable, relevant user insights that can inform design decisions and guide you to build a user-centered product.

But recruiting the right research participants can be a lot of work. From tapping into niche audiences to ensuring everyone shows up, there’s a maze of challenges that come with recruiting ideal test participants.

That’s where this guide comes in—your overview of participant recruitment, complete with insights from UX professionals across the industry.

Starting off our guide, this chapter will explain how to successfully recruit the right research participants for your study, before covering the main obstacles you’ll likely face and how to overcome them. We finish up with expert-led best practices from UX professionals at Creative Navy, League, TietoEVRY, and Groupe Foyer.

Participant recruitment is the process of finding and onboarding people to participate in your UX research study. It typically involves reaching out to potential participants, screening them, and scheduling sessions to conduct product testing and collect first-hand user insights.

You have the choice of either manually recruiting participants by reaching out through traditional channels like emails, or using a research participant panel to connect with vetted testers. Either way, research recruitment can be done for any user research method, whether it’s user interviews, usability testing, or card sorting.

Recruiting the right users is an important process of any UX research process because it gives you access to insights that drive data-backed product decisions.

While it may be tempting to conduct user research with colleagues or friends, or skip the process altogether, without recruitment your UX research projects come to a grinding halt. Not recruiting participants means you won’t be able to test your design with real people that match your user base.

A faulty participant recruitment process can be just as bad. Failure to screen participants can result in insights that don’t match your user base’s needs. Similarly, not accounting for diversity across participants can result in a less-than-accessible design.

👉 The bottom line: The right participants lead to the right insights. And the right insights lead to user-centered designs.

The short answer is it depends.

The Nielsen Norman Group maintains you can uncover 85% of user problems with just five participants. Once you’re over five users, there’s a chance of diminishing returns. Anything less, and you don’t uncover enough insights. It’s a nice, neat, and well-rounded number. But really knowing how many users you need for research is a tad more complicated.

While five is a good starting point, we maintain that there isn’t a hard and fast rule for how many participants you need to recruit.

Instead, we recommend choosing a range based on your UX research method. For example, The five-user rule works well for usability testing, but you may need to dive into different user segments to uncover the remaining 15% of usability issues for higher-stakes projects.

Qualitative, in-depth UX research methods like interviews and focus groups need eight to twelve participants before patterns emerge. For quantitative close-ended UX surveys, you need dozens, if not hundreds, of answers to achieve statistical significance.

Now it’s time to start the participant recruitment process. From finding participants to making sure they have everything they need for your testing session, here’s how to recruit user research participants in five steps.

Begin by circling back to your UX research objective. Remind yourself what you’re trying to achieve by testing participants, and how you intend to achieve it.

These two points will be the basis for fleshing out a more detailed UX research plan for recruitment. Continue by defining:

Having this top-level recruitment plan provides you with a blueprint to collect insights. However, you still need to find the right type of participant.

You may think you’ll know the ideal participant when you see them. However, that’s not always the case.

Make sure the participants you recruit are representatives of your existing and potential users. Elba Ornelas, Senior Product Designer at League, advises you to look at your user personas to drill down to the exact participants you need:

Kate Varga, Senior UX Designer at Creative Navy, seconds this, but highlights some occasions to divert from personas:

“The specificity of the user profile largely depends on the project’s scope. If it’s broad (e.g. your product is in the early days, you’re trying to understand what features you could add or what’s not going well with the present iteration), recruiting someone who doesn’t match your persona to a T can prove to be a blessing.

“On the other hand, if you do want to test something specific, you need to establish and understand your user personas. It also helps to define what knowledge you’re trying to gain from this round of research. Define and memorize these parameters to avoid wasting both your client’s time and the user’s.”

One way to speed up matching with the right personas is by utilizing a participant recruitment tool that can target candidates through custom demographic filters. This enables you to speed up the participant recruitment process, guarantee persona matches, and have more time for the actual research.

If you’re using a participant panel like the Maze Panel, you might not need to manually conduct screening surveys. However, you might want to customize the questions.

Screener questions act as a sieve, helping you filter out participants who don’t match your user persona or other tester criteria. They maximize the value you get from recruitment and ensure participants you’ve chosen are relevant to your study.

To make your screening successful, avoid asking leading questions that instruct a person to answer in a specific way. Make sure questions are directly related to the user persona you’ve created for recruitment. For example, your product might be specifically made for HR professionals. A screener's question would be: 'How many years of experience do you have working in Human Resources?' Without that piece of information, you can’t know if the participant is qualified to test your product or not.

Kate encourages focusing screener questions on product familiarity: “The product itself is built for a specific user group, so that acts as my first point of reference. I find that demographic questions can be essential if I’m looking for a specific group (for example, people with a certain level of digital literacy).”

That being said, Geoffrey Crofte, Senior UX Lead at Groupe Foyer advises careful consideration of your goals and users when it comes to disqualifying screener questions:

“We tend to avoid key disqualifying questions, because all opinions matter. For example, for our insurance company creating a product for ‘Active mobility’, a first disqualifying question could be ‘Do you mostly drive a car, or go to work using alternative solutions like bike, bus, scooter or foot?’”

“Users might be disqualified if they mostly drive a car, but this is a beginner’s mistake. Maybe this person is driving a car because they don’t know better, or they have key blockers to adopt another way. So feedback from this person could in fact be more valuable.”

Whatever your questions, a tool that directly integrates screeners before your UX research test begins can be especially helpful. Maze custom screeners let you add up to five multiple-choice questions before your participants begin the test. Participants who don’t make the cut will be met with a rejection screen, while those who satisfy the criteria will be able to access your testing questions.

With your screener questions there to safeguard you from the wrong participants and confirm eligibility, you’re ready to start recruiting; all you need to do now is find the right people.

The good news about recruiting is that you don’t need to commit to a single channel for finding participants. Some promising recruitment strategies and channels include:

Snowball sampling, which takes its name from the well-known snowball effect, is a participant recruitment method that involves asking initial, relevant participants to refer other potential participants. It can be useful for general and highly-focused studies alike.

Once you settle on your chosen channels and methods, it’s time to smoothly onboard your participants so they’re ready for testing.

Before kicking off the research session, it’s important your participants have clear instructions and expectations about the process.

You should cover:

We also recommend emphasizing that the test isn’t an assessment of them, or their capabilities. There are no right answers—it’s a way for your team to learn from their perspective. Depending on the research method, you can explain it as a test for the platform, rather than the user.

We put together this message template you can use:

Copied and pasted onto your clipboard? Great. Let’s talk about some recruitment challenges you’ll encounter—and how to avoid them.

There’s a lot to do before you can get participants in to answer questions or test out your product. Participant recruitment is a complex process with many roadblocks—luckily, you’re about to read how to overcome the four main challenges that arise in UX research participant recruitment. Let’s go!

Not all types of participants are equally easy to find. Depending on your product goals, you may need to tap into niche audiences with specialized skills. For example, a product that organizes patient information for surgeons will give you a much narrower participant pool than if you were recruiting testers for a project management tool.

Niche participants will be less likely to engage with broad participant outreach. Instead, you might need to join specialized social media groups, professional associations, or conferences and build relationships with people within the industry.

Marcus was conducting a two-day website accessibility test at TietoEVRY, and shares how he partnered with a national organization when recruiting research participants with disabilities:

“We wanted to determine if blind users could navigate it effectively with their accessibility aids. For this, we partnered with a national organization representing visually impaired individuals. They connected us with participants who matched our criteria, providing a reliable and ethical recruitment pipeline.”

Once you’ve connected with folks from your niche audience, it’s worth nurturing these relationships throughout the entire product development testing process, to cultivate a reliable, repeatable participant pool.

It’s tempting to recruit whoever is available soonest, but this is a rookie mistake. Recruiting this way can lead to skewed results and an inaccessible design by not intentionally seeking out and including people with diverse backgrounds.

Build a representative sample size of different genders, races, cultures, minorities, and socioeconomic walks of life. It can be worth capturing demographics within screening so you have the information readily available.

To improve your chances of recruiting across diverse groups, consider diversifying your recruitment channels, too. Partnerships with community centers, advocacy groups, and region-specific forums can help. Opting for participant panels are a good tactic to increase your recruitment reach—provided they let you connect with vetted testers from other countries, of course.

Navigating the maze of consent and legal requirements for user research can feel daunting, but it doesn’t have to be complicated.

To safely adhere to legal requirements, you need to:

Marcus emphasizes: “it’s essential to be transparent with participants about how their data will be used and stored. This includes providing a detailed list of what will be recorded, ensuring anonymity, and explaining their rights—such as the ability to withdraw consent and request data deletion.”

Not only is this practice ethical, but it also ensures you’re complying with data protection laws such as the General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) for European Union (EU) countries.

Make sure to do additional research on regulations specific to your product’s particular industry. For example, clinical research that involves healthcare provider data needs to comply with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) within the U.S., meaning you need to de-identify personal health data.

Geoffrey explains that Groupe Foyer, as an insurance company in Luxembourg, Groupe Foyer cannot store client information in the cloud:

“We also keep only the required information about our clients, and never share them with any other services inside the company to avoid potential backfire/misuse.”

Remember: even if you’re confident of legal restrictions and responsibilities, double check before kicking off your participant recruitment.

There’s not much worse than setting aside time for a participant, only for them to not attend an interview or drop midway through a survey. There can be plenty of explanations, ranging from personal issues to schedule changes and even forgetfulness.

Whatever the reason, there are ways to minimize your chances of this happening. Marcus suggests “planning for a certain percentage of dropouts, typically 10-20%” to avoid needing to conduct further research down the line.

Kate from Creative Navy shares her personal tips for maximizing attendance:

So we’ve covered challenges that come with participant recruitment, but what are the best practices to keep in mind when planning your recruitment?

Here’s the basics for your participant recruitment strategy.

When you recruit participants for a research study, set up a system that will help you keep in touch with them and manage relationships for current and future studies. Having this information handy allows you to create a list of interested test participants you can reach out to for different projects.

To do this, you can:

Whether your research team opts for manual or automated participant management, use this system to track the progress of recruitment—e.g. ‘Approved’, ‘Screening questions sent’, ‘Awaiting consent’.

If you’ve opted for a participant management tool, you should have access to more developed management options—for example, Maze Reach allows researchers to:

It’s up to you whether you want to offer incentives or not. On the one hand, offering incentives such as payment, vouchers, or covering expenses like hotel and travel costs for in-person research, can encourage participation.

On the other hand, participants can end up taking part solely in the hope of winning the incentive.

If you decide to give incentives, the type of incentive you offer should depend on how long the research will take and the type of participants you need.

Elba from League adds, “Depending on the characteristics of the end-users, one type of incentive could be more suitable than others. For example, Amazon gift cards are a great general option, meanwhile offering something from the service, such as a free premium trial, can be a good incentive for existing users.”

However you record and track participants, remember to keep in touch with them regularly. This way, you can develop a Customer Advisory Board or community of users for research and feedback.

Nabeena Mali, Head of Product at BfB Labs, says they build relationships with their target audience to get feedback and generate ideas:

“As our user testing involves children, we have built strong relationships with local schools who have an interest in using our products,” Mali explains. “Not only do we work with them to test the product, but they are also involved in the co-creation workshops we run to generate ideas.”

A couple of things that help them strengthen their relationship with local schools: pairing up with schools that share their values, and making the entire UX research process fun and engaging for their young audience.

Thanks to the relationships they built, Mali says, “often the schools were more than happy to be involved in early pilots and even helped facilitate introductions to more parents.”

Keeping these best practices in mind when recruiting research participants for your UX research study will ensure you collate the perfect testing pool.

A solid participant recruitment process helps you find the ideal people for testing your product, ultimately giving you insights reflective of your user base. That’s precisely why you need to establish your objectives, find the right channels, design screener questions, and use the right methodology to find participants that match your user persona.

The question remains: What are the best methods for the job?

That’s exactly what we’re exploring in the second chapter of this participant recruitment guide.

Before you get started, we recommend using a tool like Maze Panel to make recruiting participants easier. Maze is a leading user research platform that empowers UX researchers to get game-changing user insights. Whether you need to conduct surveys, card sorting, or build a database of research participants with tools like Reach, Maze makes the process quick and easy.