When recruiting participants for usability tests, make sure that they are as close as possible to your target audience. If your website is live and you have a pool of existing users, then your job is much easier. However, if you do not have a user pool, or you want to test with people who have not used your site, then you need to create a specification for appropriate users that you can give to a recruiter or use yourself.
To specify your target audience, consider what kinds of people use your website, and what attributes will cause them to behave differently to other users. If you have created personas during previous research, use these to help identify target user characteristics. If you are designing a website ...
