5 tips to recruit user research participants that represent the real world

Whether you’re running focus groups for your pricing strategy or conducting usability testing for a new product, user interviews are one of the most effective research methods to get the needle-moving insights you need. But to discover meaningful data that helps you reach your goals, you need to connect with high-quality participants. 

This article shares five tips to help you optimize your recruiting efforts and find the right people for any type of research study.

How to find the perfect participants for your next user research project

From usability testing to market research, hone your user research recruiting strategy with these five tips to find the best people for your study.

1. Define your research goals to identify the right participants

As with most things in life, the ‘perfect’ research participant is subjective. The ideal respondent for Study A might be the wrong type of user for Study B, because the studies have totally different objectives.

Mapping out your research goals is crucial to defining your target audience. Knowing the questions you’re trying to answer (such as “How do Spanish-speaking marketers use our product?”) will clarify who the ‘right participants’ for your research study are (i.e. Spanish-speaking marketers). 

Here are some examples of what the right user research participants might look like depending on your goals:

Once you’ve identified what you’re trying to achieve and what data you need to do so, use these criteria to inform who you need to talk to for your user interviews.

2. Go global by going virtual

The user research days of yore frequently involved making participants trek to an in-person research session where the best they could hope for was a lukewarm cup of coffee. 

This approach has a number of disadvantages for everyone involved:

• It takes time and effort for participants to attend, which impacts who’s willing (and able) to join

• It’s not very accessible, as it excludes people who can’t make that small window of availability (like parents, caretakers, and people with fixed working hours), people who can’t or don’t want to travel, and anyone affected by physical limitations of the space (for example, if the building isn’t wheelchair accessible)

• It limits the insights you get to local perspectives only, meaning your results may reflect specific demographics or biases and not be very representative 

Virtual user interview tools like Contentsquare’s Interviews (oh hello 👋) let you connect with willing UX research participants from all over the world, enabling you to conduct user interviews from anywhere, with anyone. Moving your interviews online also widens your potential participant pool by

• Giving participants greater flexibility to join at their preferred times and from familiar locations

• Expanding your research to other places and people you couldn’t otherwise reach

• Making the research process more comfortable and convenient by empowering interviewees to take part in the way that suits them best

3. Use screener surveys to streamline the recruitment process  

Screener surveys are used to qualify (or disqualify) potential participants from your study. They let you get more granular with your requirements, filter for exactly what you need, and improve the efficiency of your user research—as well as the quality of your data. 

After finding respondents who meet the key criteria you’ve outlined in the previous steps, you can use a screener survey to zoom in further or remove people who aren’t a good fit from your participant pool.

Here’s an example: say you’re building a platform that helps small-business owners create a website without coding knowledge. After selecting your main criteria, you might ask, “Do you have any experience with coding?” Disqualifying anyone who answers “Moderate experience” or above ensures you’ll discover how easy-to-use (or not) your platform really is for complete coding newbies.

Follow these tips for effective screener surveys:

• Keep them short and simple. Longer surveys may discourage potential participants, while screening for not-strictly-necessary criteria can whittle down your participant pool too much. 

• Avoid leading questions. Subtly guiding respondents toward specific answers can skew your data, as they may respond how they think they’re ‘supposed’ to. Instead of asking ‘yes’ or ‘no’ questions, give a range of responses to choose from.

• Don’t ask questions you already have the answer to. For example, don’t use your screener for demographic information that you already have in your user interview tool. The exception is if it’s information that’s crucial to your study but which may have changed over time, such as location or educational status.

Filter potential participants in Contentsquare’s Interviews by defining your criteria and using screener surveys to find your perfect match

4. Prioritize getting different perspectives

Your product will be used by a diverse range of people with varying needs and requirements, so your product research should reflect this, too. Feedback from a wide group of people fosters empathy in design, helping you spot things that could limit, or even negatively impact, the experience of others when using your final product—for example, a mega menu that’s almost impossible to navigate for colorblind users, or a feature name that means something totally different in local slang (😱).

That’s why it’s important to find people with an array of different backgrounds and experiences when recruiting research participants. Use a tool like Contentsquare Interviews, which has a built-in participant pool of over 200,000 people from all over the world, to get a range of perspectives that meet the specific needs of your research study. 

Look for variety across demographic factors like

• Age

• Gender identity

• Geographic location

• Education level

• Ethnicity

• Language

5. Sweeten the deal with incentives

You know what they say: time is money—or gift cards.

If you’re struggling to recruit participants for your research study—for example, if you have niche audience requirements, busy target users (like CEOs), or lengthy research sessions—offering incentives can improve your response rate. 

Compensation can also reduce no-shows, ensuring all the hard work you did to prepare for your user research doesn’t go to waste. 

Finally, it’s also an empathetic way of showing appreciation for your participants’ time and effort (because who doesn’t like getting thanked for their contributions?).

To streamline the process and avoid introducing extra admin work for your researchers, look for a tool with a compensation functionality built in (like Contentsquare Interviews). This way, you can easily adjust the amount offered based on your budget and needs.

Contentsquare’s Interviews tool makes compensating research participants effortless

How UX studio finds the right research participants in days, not weeks

UI/UX design and research consultancy UX studio runs research projects at every stage of product development for clients like Netflix, Cisco, and HBO.

In the past, the team performed manual, time-consuming recruitment to find interviewees, scouring social media platforms and forums to find the right participants. But this recruitment process often took 2–3 weeks, and sucked up hours of their UX researchers’ valuable time.

UX studio needed a tool that could meet its three main requirements:

1. Faster recruitment so that the team could focus on researching, not recruiting—and get quick results for clients 

2. A global participant pool to facilitate projects spanning different countries and languages

3. More precision to help them meet the specific requirements of B2B research needs, which were challenging to recruit for

They found the solution with Hotjar’s user interview tool, now part of the Contentsquare group. As a result 

✅ Recruitment time decreased from 2–3 weeks to 1–2 days

✅ They can connect with a diverse range of participants from around the world

✅ They’re able to find the exact people they need across industry, role, and seniority

Why inclusivity matters when recruiting participants

• Identify issues and opportunities you would otherwise miss: get fresh insights and deeper customer understanding. Use this data to make more informed decisions, guide product development, and prioritize your roadmap based on what different groups of users need.

• Increase your total addressable market: ensure your product design is usable by as many people as possible. Removing barriers like accessibility issues allows you to appeal to more users, while understanding the unique needs of different groups helps you expand into new markets.

• Make your product better for everyone: make data-driven fixes, improvements, and innovations based on real people’s needs. Help them get more value from your product and enjoy the user experience—leading to increased customer satisfaction and retention.

Improve your user recruitment process, improve your data

When it comes to research, your user recruitment sets the foundation for everything that’s to follow—including the quality of your results. Use the above tips to find right-fit participants that match your research criteria while also representing a diversity of viewpoints and experiences, and you’ll get accurate, insightful data that elevates your product, every time.

FAQs about UX recruiting