For those new to the qualitative research space, there’s one question that’s usually pretty tough to figure out, and that’s the question of how many participants to include in a study. Regardless of whether it’s research as part of the discovery phase for a new product, or perhaps an in-depth canvas of the users of an existing service, researchers can often find it difficult to agree on the numbers. So is there an easy answer? Let’s find out.

Here, we’ll look into the right number of participants for qualitative research studies. If you want to know about participants for quantitative research, read Nielsen Norman Group’s article.

Getting the numbers right

So you need to run a series of user interviews or usability tests and aren’t sure exactly how many people you should reach out to. It can be a tricky situation – especially for those without much experience. Do you test a small selection of 1 or 2 people to make the recruitment process easier? Or, do you go big and test with a series of 10 people over the course of a month? The answer lies somewhere in between.

It’s often a good idea (for qualitative research methods like interviews and usability tests) to start with 5 participants and then scale up by a further 5 based on how complicated the subject matter is. You may also find it helpful to add additional participants if you’re new to user research or you’re working in a new area.

What you’re actually looking for here is what’s known as saturation.

Understanding saturation

Whether it’s qualitative research as part of a master’s thesis or as research for a new online dating app, saturation is the best metric you can use to identify when you’ve hit the right number of participants.

In a nutshell, saturation is when you’ve reached the point where adding further participants doesn’t give you any further insights. It’s true that you may still pick up on the occasional interesting detail, but all of your big revelations and learnings have come and gone. A good measure is to sit down after each session with a participant and analyze the number of new insights you’ve noted down.

Interestingly, in a paper titled How Many Interviews Are Enough?, authors Greg Guest, Arwen Bunce and Laura Johnson noted that saturation usually occurs with around 12 participants in homogeneous groups (meaning people in the same role at an organization, for example). However, carrying out ethnographic research on a larger domain with a diverse set of participants will almost certainly require a larger sample.

Ensuring you’ve hit the right number of participants

How do you know when you’ve reached saturation point? You have to keep conducting interviews or usability tests until you’re no longer uncovering new insights or concepts.

While this may seem to run counter to the idea of just gathering as much data from as many people as possible, there’s a strong case for focusing on a smaller group of participants. In The logic of small samples in interview-based, authors Mira Crouch and Heather McKenzie note that using fewer than 20 participants during a qualitative research study will result in better data. Why? With a smaller group, it’s easier for you (the researcher) to build strong close relationships with your participants, which in turn leads to more natural conversations and better data.

There's also a school of thought that you should interview 5 or so people per persona. For example, if you're working in a company that has well-defined personas, you might want to use those as a basis for your study, and then you would interview 5 people based on each persona. This maybe worth considering or particularly important when you have a product that has very distinct user groups (e.g. students and staff, teachers and parents etc).

How your domain affects sample size

The scope of the topic you’re researching will change the amount of information you’ll need to gather before you’ve hit the saturation point. Your topic is also commonly referred to as the domain.

If you’re working in quite a confined domain, for example, a single screen of a mobile app or a very specific scenario, you’ll likely find interviews with 5 participants to be perfectly fine. Moving into more complicated domains, like the entire checkout process for an online shopping app, will push up your sample size.

As Mitchel Seaman notes: “Exploring a big issue like young peoples’ opinions about healthcare coverage, a broad emotional issue like postmarital sexuality, or a poorly-understood domain for your team like mobile device use in another country can drastically increase the number of interviews you’ll want to conduct.”

In-person or remote

Does the location of your participants change the number you need for qualitative user research? Well, not really – but there are other factors to consider.

• Budget: If you choose to conduct remote interviews/usability tests, you’ll likely find you’ve got lower costs as you won’t need to travel to your participants or have them travel to you. This also affects…
• Participant access: Remote qualitative research can be a lifesaver when it comes to participant access. No longer are you confined to the people you have physical access to — instead you can reach out to anyone you’d like.
• Quality: On the other hand, remote research does have its downsides. For one, you’ll likely find you’re not able to build the same kinds of relationships over the internet or phone as those in person, which in turn means you never quite get the same level of insights.

Is there value in outsourcing recruitment?

Recruitment is understandably an intensive logistical exercise with many moving parts. If you’ve ever had to recruit people for a study before, you’ll understand the need for long lead times (to ensure you have enough participants for the project) and the countless long email chains as you discuss suitable times.

Outsourcing your participant recruitment is just one way to lighten the logistical load during your research. Instead of having to go out and look for participants, you have them essentially delivered to you in the right number and with the right attributes.

We’ve got one such service at Optimal Workshop, which means it’s the perfect accompaniment if you’re also using our platform of UX tools. Read more about that here.

Wrap-up

So that’s really most of what there is to know about participant recruitment in a qualitative research context. As we said at the start, while it can appear quite tricky to figure out exactly how many people you need to recruit, it’s actually not all that difficult in reality.

Overall, the number of participants you need for your qualitative research can depend on your project among other factors. It’s important to keep saturation in mind, as well as the locale of participants. You also need to get the most you can out of what’s available to you. Remember: Some research is better than none!

Over the past year, we've been busy getting ready to bring Reframer v2 out of beta. After implementing a ton of feedback from our superb beta users and plenty of usability testing, the day has finally arrived. It's time to say bye-bye beta!

What is Reframer v2 beta?

Reframer v2 is a connected, collaborative and flexible workflow for your qualitative research and analysis. It allows you to capture, code, group, visualize and analyze your data within one single tool. And it's now available to all Optimal Workshop customers on a paid plan!

Conducting user interviews or usability tests? Reframer v2 is your new best friend.

To all the Reframer users out there, you'll be chuffed to know that we've taken the best bits of the original tool and added better analysis and collaboration (among other things). We think you'll really enjoy using Reframer v2 (and there's plenty of help to get you up and running in no time).

Why should I use Reframer v2?

We made it our mission to alleviate those pesky pain points that so many researchers have when conducting qualitative analysis.

No more context switching

Observations, notes and metadata spread across different tools? No thanks. There's no need for multiple platforms anymore.

Reframer v2 offers an intuitive end-to-end qualitative research workflow within one tool. Create and conduct interview sessions, capture notes, tag, group, theme, analyze, and collaborate without having to leave the app.

Detailed insights at your fingertips

With all your juicy data living in different tools, it can be pretty tricky to filter and gain in-depth insight.

Reframer v2 doesn't take a "one size fits all" approach. It's specifically built for qualitative research, with all your metadata and context in one place, all easily searchable with powerful filters.

Analyze your data your way

When you're ready for analysis, you don't want to be stuck doing it one way or the other.

We've added two different analysis methods to Reframer v2. Affinity mapping helps you with observation-based analysis, which is flexible, visual and collaborative. While the Themes tab offers tag-based analysis with powerful filters, giving you more quantifiable results.

Collaborate in real-time

Collaboration is key during qualitative research and analysis.

You can work together with your team members in Reframer v2. Simply invite them to your study and any edits or notes they make will show on the affinity map in real-time. You can also see their activity in the Study Members tab.

What will happen to the original Reframer?

Reframer v1 will be turned off eventually, and Reframer v2 will simply become Reframer. But we want to make sure that v2 is up to scratch, your data is safe and sound, and you're confident in using v2 before that happens.

Take a look at the next steps of the Reframer v2 release:

June 2022

Reframer v2 is rolled out to all paid customers. Based on feedback, we'll continue to build in and iterate on the most requested features. Reframer v2 will be the default for all new paid users, but current users can continue to toggle between v1 and v2.

Oct 2022

Reframer v2 is rolled out to all customers and is the default for all users. All studies in legacy Reframer will be moved into v2. Paid customers will have access to the full feature set, free users will have access to a limited version of the tool.

Early 2023 (date TBC)

Legacy Reframer is turned off and v2 becomes the new (and only) Reframer.

So there you have it! We're really excited to have Reframer v2 in front of all our paid customers, and we can't wait to hear what you think of it. If you've got suggestions or thoughts (good, bad or ugly), we want to know! Simply click the Feedback icon in the header and voila!

Summary: The notetaking side of qualitative research is often one of the most off-putting parts of the process. We developed Reframer to make this easier, so here are 6 tips to help you get the most out of this powerful tool.

In 2018, a small team at Optimal Workshop set out to entirely revamp our approach of providing learning resources to our users and community. We wanted to practice what we preached, and build a new blog website from the ground up with a focus on usability and accessibility. As you can probably imagine, this process involved a fair amount of user research.

While we certainly ran our fair share of quantitative research, our primary focus was on speaking to our users directly, which meant carrying out a series of user interviews – and (of course) using Reframer.

There’s really no overselling the value of qualitative user research. Sure, it can be off-putting for new researchers due to its perceived effort and cost, but the insights you’ll gain about your users can’t be found anywhere else.

We knew of the inherent value in qualitative research, but we were also aware that things like interviews and usability testing would be put off due to the time required to both carry out the tests and time spent hours in workshops trying to pull insights out of the data.

So, with that in mind, here are 6 tips to make the most out of our recently released from beta tool, Reframer!

1. How to create good observations

Observations are a core piece of the puzzle when it comes to effectively using Reframer. Observations are basically anything you see or hear during the course of your interview, usability test or study. It could be something like the fact that a participant struggled with the search bar or that they didn’t like the colors on the homepage.

Once you’ve collected a number of observations you can dive into the behaviors of your users and draw out patterns and themes – more on this further on in the article.

As for creating good observations using Reframer, here are a few tips:

• Record your sessions (audio or video): If you can, record the audio and video from your session. You’ll be able to listen or watch the session after the fact and pick up on anything you may have missed. Plus, recordings make for a good point of reference if you need to clarify anything.
• Note down timestamps during the session: Make a note of the time whenever something interesting happens. This will help you to jump back into the recording later and listen or watch the part again.
• Write your observations during the session: If you can’t, try and write everything down as soon as the session finishes. It’s a good idea to ask around and see if you can get someone else to act as a notetaker.
• Make a note of everything – even if it doesn’t seem to matter: Sometimes even the smallest things can have a significant impact on how a participant performs in a usability test. Note down if they’re having trouble with the keyboard, for example.

2. Tips for using tags correctly

The ability to tag different observations is one of the most powerful aspects of Reframer, and can significantly speed up the analysis side of research. You can think of tags as variables that you can use to filter your data later. For example, if you have a tag labeled “frustrated”, you can apply it to all of the relevant observations and then quickly view every instance when a participant was feeling frustrated after you’ve concluded your test.

When it comes to user interviews and usability tests, however, there are a couple of things to keep in mind when tagging.

For user interviews, it’s best not to apply tags until after you’ve finished the session. If you go and preload in a number of tags, you’ll likely (if unintentionally) introduce bias.

For usability tests, on the other hand, it’s best to set up your tags prior to going into a session. As just one example, you might have a number of tags relating to sentiment or to the tasks participants will perform. Setting up these types of tags upfront can speed up analysis later on.

If there’s one universal rule to keep in mind when it comes to Reframer tags, it’s that less is more. You can use Reframer’s merge feature to consolidate your tags, which is especially useful if you’ve got multiple people adding observations to your study. You can also set up groups to help manage large groups of tags.

3. After a session, take the time to review your data

Yes, it’s tempting to just shut your laptop and focus on something else for a while after finishing your session – but here’s an argument for spending just a little bit of time tidying up your data.

The time straight after a session has finished is also the best time to take a quick pass over your observations. This is the time when everything about the interview or usability test is still fresh in your mind, and you’ll be able to more easily make corrections to observations.

In Reframer, head over to the ‘Review’ tab and you’ll be presented with a list of your observations. If you haven’t already, or you think you’ve missed some important ones, now is also a good time to add tags.

You can also filter your observations to make the process of reviewing data a little easier. You can filter by the study member who wrote the observation as well as any starred observations that study members have created. If you know what you’re looking for, the keyword search is another useful tool.

Taking the time to make corrections to tags and observations now will mean you’ll be able to pull much more useful insights later on.

4. Create themes using the theme builder

With all of your observations tidied up and tags correctly applied, it’s time to turn our attention to the theme builder. This is one of the most powerful parts of Reframer. It allows you to see all of the different relationships between your tagged observations and then create themes based on the relationships.

The really neat thing with the theme builder is that as you continue to work on your study by feeding in new observations, the top 5 themes will display on the Results Overview page. This means you can constantly refer back to this page throughout your project. Note that while the theme builder will update automatically, it’s best to tag as many observations as possible to get the most useful data.

You can read a detailed guide of how to actually create themes using the theme builder in our Knowledge Base article.

5. Take advantage of Reframer’s built-in visualization functionality

So, whether your experience with Reframer starts with this article or you’ve already had a play around with the tool, it should be clear that tags are important. This functionality is really what enables you to get the kind of analysis and insight that you can out of your data in Reframer.

But you can actually take this a step further and transform the data from your tagging into visualizations – perfect for demonstrating your results to your team or to stakeholders. There are 2 visualization options in Reframer.

First of all, there’s the chord diagram. As you can see from the picture below, the chord diagram allows you to explore the relationships between different tagged observations, which in turn helps you to spot themes. The different colored chord lines connect different tag nodes, with thicker lines representing the more times 2 tags appear on the same observation. Again, the more data you have (observations and tags), the richer or more in-depth the visualization.

The bubble chart is a little different. This visualization simply shows the frequency of your tags as ‘bubbles’ or circles. The larger the bubble, the more frequently that tag appears in your observations.

6. Import all of your qualitative research notes

Reframer works best when it’s used as the one repository for all of your qualitative research. After all, we designed the tool to replace the clutter and mess that’s typically associated with qualitative research.

You can easily import all of your existing observations from either spreadsheets or text documents using the ‘Import’ function. It’s also possible to just enter your observations directly into Reframer at any point.

You’ll likely find that by using Reframer in this way, there’ll be little chance of you losing track of research data over time. One of the biggest issues for research or UX teams is information loss when someone leaves the organization. Keep everything in Reframer, and you can avoid that loss of data if someone ever leaves.

Wrap-up

While quantitative research is often considered easiest to wrap your head around, qualitative research is also well-worth adding into to your workflow to ensure you're seeing the whole picture as you make important design decisions. This article is really just a surface-level overview of some of the neat things you can do with Reframer. We’ve got some other articles on our blog about how you can best use this tool, but the best place to really dig into the detail is in the Optimal Workshop Knowledge Base.

Reframer is a qualitative research tool that was built to help teams capture and make sense of their research findings quickly and easily. For those of you who have been a long-standing Optimal Workshop customer, you may know that Reframer has been in beta for some time. In fact, it has been in beta for 2 whole years. Truth was that, while we’ve cheerfully responded to your feedback with a number of cool features and improvements, we had some grand plans up our sleeve. So, we took everything we learned and went back to drawing board with the goal to provide the best dang experience we can.We’ll soon be ready to launch Reframer out of beta and let it take its place proudly as a full time member of our suite of user research tools. However, in the spirit of continuous improvement, we want to give you all a chance to use it and give us feedback on the new experience so far.

First-time Reframer user?

Awesome! You’ll get to experience the newer version of Reframer with a fresh set of eyes. To enable Reframer, log in to your Optimal Workshop account. On your dashboard you’ll see a button to join the Reframer beta on your screen at right.

Used Reframer before?

Any new studies you create will automatically use the slick new version. Not quite ready to learn the new awesome? No worries you can toggle back and forth between the old version and the new in the top right corner of your screen.To learn about Reframer’s new look and features, watch the video or read the transcript below to hear more about these changes and why we made them.

When is Reframer actually coming out of beta?

This year. Stay tuned.

Video transcript:

We’re this close to having our qualitative research tool, Reframer, all set to release from beta.But we just couldn’t wait to share some of the changes we’ve got lined up. So, we’ve gone ahead and launched a fresh version of Reframer to give you a taste of what’s to come.These latest updates include a more streamlined workflow and a cleaner user interface, as well as laying the foundations for some exciting features in the coming months.So let’s take a look at the revamped Reframer.We’ve updated the study screen to help you get started and keep track of where your research is at.

• You now have an area for study objectives to keep your team on the same page

• And an area for reference links, to give you quick access to prototypes and other relevant documents

• Session information is now shown here too, so you can get an overview of all your participants at a glance

• And we’ve created a home for your tags with more guidance around how to use them, like example tags and groups to help you get started.

What’s the most important thing when observing a research session? Collecting insights of course! So we’ve simplified the capture experience to let you focus on taking great notes.

• You can choose to reveal your tags, so they’re at the ready, or hide them so you can save your tagging till later

• We’ve created a whole range of keyboard shortcuts to speed up adding and formatting observations

• The import experience is now more streamlined, so it’s easier to bring observations from other sources into Reframer

• And, with some huge improvements behind the scenes, Reframer is even faster, giving you a more seamless note taking experience.

Now for something totally new — introducing review mode. Here you can see your own observations, as well as those made by anyone else in your team. This makes it easy to tidy up and edit your data after your session is complete. You can filter, search and tag observations, so you’ll be ready to make sense of everything when you move to analysis.We’ve added more guidance throughout Reframer, so you’ll have the confidence you’re on the right track. New users will be up and running in no time with improved help and easy access to resources.You might notice a few changes to our UI as well, but it’s not just about looks.

• We’ve changed the font to make it easier to read on any screen size

• Our updated button colours to provide better contrast and hierarchy

• And we’ve switched our icons from fonts to images to make them more accessible to more users.

And that’s where we’re at.We've got a lot more exciting features to come, so why not jump in, give the new Reframer a try and tell us what you think!Send us your feedback and ideas at research@optimalworkshop.com and keep an eye out for more changes coming soon. Catch you later!