We all know that carrying out usability testing takes time and money, so it is very important that you are testing with the right participants.
Your research is only as good as the participants that take part – talking to the wrong people will provide you with a lot of useless data, but speaking to the right people will lead to meaningful data and insights, which can be used to make the best user-centered decisions for your system.
What do we mean by “the right participants”?
Every product and service has a target audience. Your target audience should represent your actual users. Only those participants who represent your target audience and your actual users, can provide valid feedback to help make meaningful and useful changes and improvements to your service.
When recruiting for small sample user research sessions, behaviours and attitudes are more important than demographics or opinions. One great way of figuring out who your target audience is, is by doing persona research.
Recruiting participants will always be a very involved process as ensuring the correct participants are recruited is essential to avoid wasting time, effort and budget. It is one of those tasks where spending a bit of money to ensure it gets done correctly is a must. Partnering with a recruitment company (like Bunnyfield) is ideal, as they are experts at what they do and have the processes and contacts in place to ensure the correct people are recruited.
How to get the right participants
Bunnyfield have been running since 2008, and currently have a no show rate of 0.2% for the last 12 months. This is compared to the industry average of around 5%. Ensuring there are very few dropouts is a must.
As we know, we all tend to research with the minimum number of participants needed to get significant findings in an attempt to make savings. For example, you may have a number of personas and choose to test with only a couple of each persona type, so if a participant drops out and you don’t get a replacement, you may end up losing insight for that particular persona and not gather the necessary information you need to make the best decision for that persona group.
We have 3 offices across the UK (London, Oxfordshire and Sheffield), with a contact list of over 11,000 participants. We work with a 10 working day lead time, but if we have the availability we can be a bit flexible with this.
Bunnyfield has a small dedicated team, with a member at each of our locations which means you have direct access to your recruiter, unlike the larger companies where you will be dealing with a middle man and will not know your recruiter. It also allows for a speedy response if a participant is late or doesn’t arrive for their session.
Would you like to discuss your recruitment needs? Contact more@bunnyfield.com
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