1. Access to Users

Recruitment and panel management remain one of the most challenging and agonizing parts of UX research. While many larger practices now have roles and teams dedicated to research operations, most do not. Building out and maintaining a panel can be tedious but allows for fast research when requests start coming in.

Initial and Ongoing Recruitment

There are a couple of methods I have employed for recruitment. Most require collaboration with the marketing and product teams, but can be highly effective for filling out a study or building a panel.

• Marketing email blast - At BUILT BY GIRLS there was a monthly newsletter sent out to members that we leveraged, along with one-off email blasts. This was an effective strategy for the B2C model, and I found it to be a good opportunity to advertise either individual research opportunities or joining the research community in general.

• Website or in-app - Utilizing pop-ups and notifications within the product can be super effective at targeting users at a certain point in their journey. Catching users at the right time when they are their most engaged is very desirable for UX research, but requires the collaboration of product, and sometimes marketing and engineering to pull this off.

• Registration/survey piggyback - One of my personal favorite methods of building a panel is through adding in an opt in on a registration or rolling survey. This ensures you always have an influx of new participants, while having to do little to no extra work to recruit them. The downside is, they can be a fairly unengaged group. At Medallia, we added this to a customer feedback survey and grew our panel from 0 to 800 in under two years, and for Girl Scouts of the USA it was included in registration for members meaning almost all new members became part of the panel.

• User communities - A final method I have employed for user recruitment are user communities. Often, brand loyalists will create their own communities to support each other, and sometimes even the company themselves will host these groups. Tapping into this group of users can produce some highly engaged participants but can lead to some bias. At Medallia I would attend MUG (Medallia User Group) meetings to pitch research opportunities or gain quick feedback on a project.

Panel Maintainence

While growing the panel is the biggest challenge, maintaining the panel is something that should not be overlooked. As a UX professional myself, I am never not concerned about providing the best user experience for users — and research participation is just another user experience! Here are my top recommendations for maintaining a healthy panel (aka group of engaged users):

1. Provide ample opportunity to opt out. Maintaining a large list of participants where only 2% ever respond is not fun. Give participants the opportunity to opt out if they are no longer interested in research opportunities. Better yet, give them the opportunity to customize what kinds of studies they might participate in, and the frequency that they’d like to be contacted.

2. Gather as detailed a profile of the user as possible. A strategy for preventing research fatigue is only targeting the most relevant users for each study. This also allows you to create personalized invites with higher chances of user participation. To do this though, you must either gather data from an internal CRM or ask users to complete a profile when registering for your research panel. I have created detailed profiles using both strategies, and also track how often I am sending invites to these users.

3. Share back findings and product improvements. Many users will participate in studies because they are motivated to improve the product they use. — an if you are a good moderator you will be sure they feel valued sharing their perspectives. By sharing back findings and product improvements, you help users see how their contributions directly influenced or changed a product. This helps to create more of feeling of community and impact within your research panel — leading to greater engagement for future studies. I’ve done this through a newsletter to our research panel sharing future opportunities and the results of their input.

Incentives

Finally, I want to share a brief note on incentives. Incentives are not only the gold standard for a quick recruitment, but they also ensure you are able to get a diversity of users. Users who might not have as much time to commit to studies will often step up when you value their time through money.

Conclusion

This research demonstrates how truly valuable UX research can be in the product lifecycle. While our product owners and executives can provide amazing vision and strategy, taking the time to not only understand our user, but test concepts can help to avoid costly investments in features that might not get a lot of use or provide value.

From this research, not only did we test the idea of gamification, but we came to understand how our frontline users truly engaged with our product. This user segment was not often engaged in research because it was difficult to find a sample, and much easier to talk to their corporate leads who would often relay their feedback. Talking directly with our primary user provided insights that not only highlighted low lift concepts but also revealed larger conceptual areas for growth.