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.

My favourite services to recruit testers

There are two services I love to use. For simple digital user tests, I use Usabilityhub, and for recruiting people for interviews and more complex projects, I like to work with the fine people behind Testingtime.

Steps to recruiting testing participants

01. Who to recruit?
Define who would be the right target group to recruit

02. Recruit internally or with an agency?
Decide if we can recruit ourselves or need help from an external recruiter like Testingtime.

03. 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

04. If you need help
  1. Choose a test day: check the agendas of the team and block a day for multiple 1-hour calls
  2. 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)
  3. Good news: the agency will take care of the scheduling 🙂

05. Create the interviews questions based on the Five-Act Interview model
  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.

Going further

More Service Design questions and answers like this one

Check out all the questions about the field, user and desk research side of Service Design.