97 Things Every UX Practitioner Should Know

Chapter 90. You Don’t Need a Lot of Money to Recruit Participants

Thomas Yung

As a UX researcher, finding and recruiting the right participants for a study is essential. If that sounds scary, here’s the good news: you don’t need a lot of money to recruit participants, if you are willing to put in the time. There are several ways to source participants. The first—using an external agency—is expensive. The cheaper way is to find them yourself, but this will take a lot more of your time. Here are some strategies that you can use.

Representative Users and Screeners

Representative users are the target audience for your study. To increase the validity of your research, use personas and user behaviors to create your screener instead of just demographics.

Sample Size

Next, you must decide how many participants to recruit. Essentially, you’re looking to have as many users as possible until you reach insights saturation, when you no longer gain new insights from having more users test your system. For most qualitative studies, five to eight users per user group will provide enough insight to derive useful design decisions. However, for quantitative methods (such as surveys), you will need to have a much larger sample size.

Incentives and Compensation

• This depends on the target audience. Find out what they normally make per hour. Compensate them based on their expertise and required ...