How do you recruit users and testers?

How do you recruit users and testers?

There are recruiting agencies out there whose job it is to help you find the right users for your interviews or for testing your service prototypes.

Steps to recruiting testing participants

Who to recruit?

Define who would be the right target group to recruit

Recruit internally or with an agency?

Decide if we can recruit ourselves or need help from an external recruiter like Testingtime.

If you recruit internally

  1. List people: make a list of names, and phone numbers and assign who will contact who.

  2. Choose a test day: check the agendas of the team and block a day for multiple 1-hour calls

  3. Scheduling link: using a tool like calendly.com

If you get help from a recruiting agency

  1. Choose a recruiting agency: I like to work with the people behing TestingTime.

  2. Choose a test day: check the agendas of the team and block a day for multiple 1-hour calls

  3. write a screener: make a document with simple questions and possible answers and show which answers validate if the person is interesting and which show that the person is not interesting (see examples below)

  4. Good news: the agency will take care of the scheduling 🙂

Create the interviews questions based

You can use the Five-Act Interview model as a base template

  1. A friendly welcome to start the interview.

  2. A series of general, open-ended context questions about the customer.

  3. Introduction to the prototype(s).

  4. Detailed tasks to get the customer to react to the prototype.

  5. A quick debrief to capture the customer’s overarching thoughts and impressions.

Q&A: Research in Service Design

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  • How do I verify that there are enough people with this problem?
  • How to prioritize user research?
  • What are good structures for a prototype?
  • Does research in service design look like research in social sciences or market research?
  • How can I know if I have a good product/service market fit?

Mapping

  • How do you start a competition analysis for a new physical service?
  • What are tricks when creating digital maps with Google Maps for research?

Recruiting and compensation of research participants

  • How much should I pay research participants?
  • What are important elements to put in a screener?
  • Should feedback be free?
  • Should I use family and friends in my prototyping testing sessions?
  • How do you recruit users and testers?
  • What are the different ways to recruit research participants?

Research reports

  • How can you make your research age well?
  • How can I visualise complex ideas with simple forms?
  • What's a good structure for a research report?
  • What are examples of research reports?
  • What information should be included in a design report?
  • ▶️ What is a good structure for a slide that summarises a research report?
  • ▶️ What are different types of research insights?
  • Why do I make websites for some workshop reports?

Synthesizing research

  • ▶️ How to structure the synthesis or insights of user testings?
  • How to analyze interviews or research data?
  • What to do when I'm stuck in analysis paralysis?
  • How can I turn open questions into numbered data?
  • How do I choose the chart type to show my data?
  • ▶️ What do I do with all the research I've made?

Surveys for Service Design

  • How can I combine surveys and interviews?
  • Is a survey a good start for a research project when you don't know much about the group you want to serve?
  • How can I make street or door to door survey less akward?

Note taking during research

  • How do you take notes during user interviews?
  • Where can I find sample interviews to train my note-taking skills?
  • Should I collect more data?

Shadowing for Service Design

  • How can I speed up a shadowing session?
  • What can make or break a shadowing session?
  • What should I do after a shadowing session?