Why User Recruitment is Crucial for Your UX Success
In order to provide an intuitive, enjoyable and engaging experience to users, you need to test and refine your efforts according to the input of real people.
User recruitment is a core part of UX testing, yet it is easy to overlook just how vital it can be to determining the value of the outcomes achieved. Here is a look at the benefits that come with good user recruitment practices to help you justify dedicating resources to this process.
Using recruitment platforms improves efficiency & accuracy
One of the biggest advantages of taking user recruitment seriously is that it will give you accurate, actionable insights into how your target audience will respond, thus empowering you to take decisions and make changes based on data that is representative of the wider marketplace, even if only a small group of participants are involved.
Using modern services like User Interviews, an Ethnio alternative, will let you pinpoint strong candidates for participation in UX testing and remove any unsuitable participants before you move forwards. This will further hone and enhance the outcomes, making the process more efficient and still giving you results that are applicable more broadly to would-be users.
Careful recruitment will avoid unhelpful reticence
While a participant may fit the bill on paper, you will not be able to derive anything useful from their involvement in UX testing if they are unwilling or unable to express themselves and provide feedback.
User recruitment helps to overcome this by letting you find people who are effective communicators, capable of speaking their mind and sharing their thoughts succinctly and with clarity, rather than clamming up and leaving you with little to go on.
Being selective prevents poor motivation
Unless participants in a study are interviewed and assessed beforehand, you may find that certain users are only there to take advantage of whatever perks are offered to them for their participation. Someone whose main interest in remuneration will be more likely to rush through and ignore the main purpose of their involvement, leaving you with data that has little or no value.
Recruitment once again lets you sort the wheat from the chaff, ensuring that any user who tests out the UX you are developing is eager to do more than just do their time and leave with their paycheck.
Choosing participants filters out unreliable users
One of the other symptoms of not properly scrutinizing the users who you involve in UX testing is that you may find that you have to spend a lot of time and effort wrangling people who are either not able to stick to the agreed-upon schedule, or not there when you need them.
Instead it is much better to check the credentials of your users carefully so that the people responsible for researching how they engage with your product or service can get on with their duties and not waste even more time coping with missed appointments or cancellations.
In short, user recruitment saves you from all of the headaches that participants can cause if they are poorly chosen.
