Every month we have fun and informative “bite sized” presentations to add some inspiration to your lunch break. These virtual events allow us to partner with amazing speakers, community groups and organizations to share their insights and hot takes on a variety of topics impacting our industry.
Join us at the end of every month for Lunch n' Learn.
Leading design processes amidst a world in transition requires all practitioners to continuously invest in their own development. One aspect worth investing in, is an ability to integrate holistic thinking into our design leadership practice. This includes re-evaluating our own biases and how that bias is reflected in the tools we choose to work with when understanding and designing for/within complex systems.
Recently our guest Susanna Carman, Strategic Designer and founder of Transition Leadership LAB, introduced us to a holistic approach to qualitative design research using Ken Wilber’s 4 Quadrant Model. Susanna explained the fundamental principles underpinning the framework, and showed how it can be used to ensure a multi-perspectival harvest of critical qualitative and quantitative data on any design project.
Susanna Carman is a Strategic Designer and research-practitioner who helps people solve complex problems, the types of problems that have to do with services, systems and human interactions. Specialising in design, leadership and learning, Susanna brings a high value toolkit and herself as Thinking Partner to design, leadership and change practitioners who are tasked with delivering sustainable solutions amidst disruptive conditions.
Susanna holds a Masters of Design Futures degree from RMIT University, and has over a decade of combined experience delivering business performance, cultural alignment and leadership development outcomes to the education, health, community development and financial services sectors. She is also the founder and host of Transition Leadership Lab, a 9-week learning lab for design, leadership and change practitioners who already have a sophisticated set of tools and mindsets, but still feel these are insufficient to meet the challenge of leading change in a rapidly transforming world.
Grab your lunch, invite your colleagues and we hope to see you at our next Lunch n' Learn 🌯🍱🍜🍲
In our latest live training session product experts, Pete and Caitlin, take us on a deep dive into the new and improved qualitative analysis tool Reframer.
The session is loaded with tips and demo’s on how to save time and streamline your qualitative research all within one tool. They also discuss best practices for setting up and conducting user interviews, and how to get the most out of your analysis.
If there’s one universal truth in user research, it’s that at some point you’re going to need to find people to actually take part in your studies. Be it a large number of participants for quantitative research or a select number for in-depth, in-person user interviews. Finding the right people (and number) of people can be a hurdle.
With the right strategy, you can source exactly the right participants for your next research project.
We share a practical step-by-step guide on how to find participants for user experience research.
It has to be acknowledged that there are challenges when recruiting research participants. You may recognize some of these:
We’ll simplify the process, talk about who the right participants are, and unpack some of the best ways to find them. Removing these blocks can be the easiest way to move forward.
1. The first step to a successful participant recruitment strategy is clarifying the goals of your user research and which methods you intend to use. Ask yourself:
2. Define who your ideal research participant is. Who is going to have the answers to your questions?
3. Work out your research recruitment strategy. That starts by understanding the differences between recruiting for qualitative and quantitative research.
Quantitative research recruiting is a numbers game. For your data analysis to be meaningful and statistically significant, you need a lot of data. This means you need to do a lot of research with a lot of people. When recruiting for quantitative research, you first have to define the population (the entire group you want to study). From there, you choose a sampling method that allows you to create a sample—a randomly selected subset of the population who will participate in your study.
Qualitative recruiting involves far fewer participants, but you do need to find a selection of ‘perfect’ participants. Those that fit neatly into your specific demographic, geographic, psychographic, and behavioral criteria relevant to your study. Recruiting quality participants for qualitative studies involves non-random sampling, screening, and plenty of communication.
How many participants to include in a qualitative research study is one of the most heavily discussed topics in user research circles. In most cases, you can get away with 5 people – that’s the short answer. With 5 people, you’ll uncover most of the main issues with the thing you’re testing. Depending on your research project there could be as many as 50 participants, but with each additional person, there is an additional cost (money and time).
Quantitative research is obviously quite different. With studies like card sorts and tree tests, you need higher participant numbers to get statistically meaningful results. Anywhere from 20 - 500 participants, again coming back to the purpose of your test and your research budget. These are usually easier and quicker to implement therefore the additional cost is lower.
Let’s get into your research recruitment strategy to find the best participants for your research project. There are 5 clear steps to get you through to the research stage:
Who are they? What do they do? How old are they? Do they already use your product? Where do they live? These are all great questions to get you thinking about who exactly you need to answer your research questions. The demographic and geographic detail of your participants are important to the quality of your research results.
Screening participants will weed out those that may not be suitable for your specific project. This can be as simple as asking if the participants have used a product similar to yours. Or coming back to your key identified demographic requirements and removing anyone that doesn’t fit these criteria.
This is important and can be time-consuming. For qualitative research projects, you can look within your organization or ask over social media for willing participants. Or if you’re short on time look at a participant recruitment service, which takes your requirements and has a catalog of available persons to call on. There’s a cost involved, but the time saving can negate this. For qualitative surveys, a great option can be a live intercept on your website or app that interrupts users and asks them to complete a short questionnaire.
In some cases you will need to provide incentives. This could be offering a prize or discount for those who complete online qualitative surveys. Or a fixed sum for those that take part in longer format quantitative studies.
Once you have waded through the emails, options, and communication from your inquiries make a list of appropriate participants. Schedule time to do the research, either in person or remotely. Be clear about expectations and how long it will take. And what the incentive to take part is.
You’ve got your participants sorted and have a great pool of people to call on. If you keep hitting the same group of people time and time again, you will experience the law of diminishing returns. Constantly returning to the same pool of participants will eventually lead to fatigue. And this will impact the quality of your research because it’s based on interviewing the same people with the same views.
There are 2 ways to avoid this problem:
Of course, it might be unavoidable to hit the same audience repeatedly when you’re testing your product development among your customer base.
Understanding your UX research recruitment strategy is crucial to recruiting quality participants. A clear idea of your purpose, who your ideal participants are, and how to find them takes time and experience.
And to make life easier you can always leave your participant recruitment with us. With a huge catalog of quality participants all at your fingertips on our app, we can recruit the right people quickly.
The accuracy of your data collection is crucial in qualitative research. It is vital that nothing is lost in translation or simply missed from the point of collection to analysis, and our latest release makes this even easier to achieve. You can now directly import interview transcripts into Qualitative Insights (previously known as Reframer), allowing you and your team to capture and tag observations effortlessly while maintaining the integrity of the information. Get ready to experience a new level of efficiency in your qualitative research!
Whether you are conducting interviews alone or with the support of your team, it’s important to prioritize building connections with participants rather than struggling to take notes and ask the right questions. Transcripts ensure you avoid losing crucial insights and context as you move from data collection to analysis and reduce the likelihood of human errors and missed observations that sometimes occur during live note-taking sessions.
It also enables smooth collaboration among team members by allowing them to review interviews and contribute to the analysis, even if they weren't present.
You can add a transcript to a new or existing study in Qualitative Insights with just a few clicks. After recording an interview or user testing session, open your Qualitative Insights study and click ‘Sessions’ then ‘+ Transcript.’
Add a session title, any session information or a link to the video for future reference in the session information box. If you have created segments, choose which ones apply to this participant; you can update these later at any time. Then click ‘import transcript.’
Click ‘Select transcript’ and ensure you made any edits before importing it. This feature supports .vtt, .srt, or .txt files. Now, click Capture observations’ to complete the import and create and tag your observations.
You will see your transcript displayed. If you use a .vtt or .srt file, you will see the speaker names have been identified. You can update the speaker names by clicking on configure speakers.
To create observations from your transcript, simply highlight text, enter a new tag or select an existing one, then click create an observation.
There is no limit to how many transcripts you can import. This means you can import all your past and future interviews, ensuring all your research data is in one place for easy access and analysis.