What do you prioritize when doing qualitative research?

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.

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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.

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Getting the numbers right

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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.

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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.

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

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Understanding saturation

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Ensuring you’ve hit the right number of participants

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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.

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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.

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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).

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How your domain affects sample size

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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.

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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.

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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.”

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In-person or remote

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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.

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• 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.

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Is there value in outsourcing recruitment?

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Wrap-up

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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.

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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!

The word “persona” has many meanings. Sometimes the term refers to a part that an actor plays, other times it can mean a famous person, or even a character in a fictional play or book. But in the field of UX, persona has its own special meaning.

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Before you get started with creating personas of your own, learn what they are and the process to create one. We'll even let you in on a great, little tip — how to use Chalkmark to refine and validate your personas.

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What is a persona?

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In the UX field, a persona is created using research and observations of your users, which is analyzed and then depicted in the form of a person’s profile. This individual is completely fictional, but is created based on the research you’ve conducted into your own users. It’s a form of segmentation, which Angus Jenkinson noted in his article “Beyond Segmentation” is a “better intellectual and practical tool for dealing with the interaction between the concept of the ‘individual’ and the concept of ‘group’”.

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Typical user personas include very specific information in order to paint an in-depth and memorable picture for the people using them (e.g., designers, marketers etc).

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The user personas you create don’t just represent a single individual either; they’ll actually represent a whole group. This allows you to condense your users into just a few segments, while giving you a much smaller set of groups to target.

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There are many benefits of using personas. Here are just a few:

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• You can understand your clients better by seeing their pain points, what they want, and what they need
 
• You can narrow your focus to a small number of groups that matter, rather than trying to design for everybody
 
• They’re useful for other teams too, from product management to design and marketing
 
• They can help you clarify your business or brand
 
• They can help you create a language for your brand
 
• You can market your products in a better, more targeted way

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How do I create a persona?

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There’s no right or wrong way to create a persona; the way you make them can depend on many things, such as your own internal resources, and the type of persona you want.

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The average persona that you’ve probably seen before in textbooks, online or in templates isn’t always the best kind to use (picture the common and overused types like ‘Busy Barry’). In fact, the way user personas are constructed is a highly debated topic in the UX industry.

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Creating good user personas

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Good user personas are meaningful descriptions — not just a list of demographics and a fake name that allows researchers to simply make assumptions.

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Indi Young, an independent consultant and founder of Adaptive Path, is an advocate of creating personas that aren’t just a list of demographics. In an article she penned on medium.com, Indi states: “To actually bring a description to life, to actually develop empathy, you need the deeper, underlying reasoning behind the preferences and statements-of-fact. You need the reasoning, reactions, and guiding principles.”

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One issue that can stem from traditional types of personas is they can be based on stereotypes, or even reinforce them. Things like gender, age, ethnicity, culture, and location can all play a part in doing this.

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In a study by Phil Turner and Susan Turner titled “Is stereotyping inevitable when designing with personas?” the authors noted: “Stereotyped user representations appear to constrain both design and use in many aspects of everyday life, and those who advocate universal design recognise that stereotyping is an obstacle to achieving design for all.”

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So it makes sense to scrap the stereotypes and, in many instances, irrelevant demographic data. Instead, include information that accurately describes the persona’s struggles, goals, thoughts and feelings — all bits of meaningful data.

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Creating user personas involves a lot of research and analyzing. Here are a few tips to get you started:

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1) Do your research

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When you’re creating personas for UX, it’s absolutely crucial you start with research; after all, you can’t just pull this information out of thin air by making assumptions! Ensure you use a mixture of both qualitative and quantitative research here in order to cast your net wide and get results that are really valuable. A great research method that falls into the realms of both qualitative and quantitative is user interviews.

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When you conduct your interviews, drill down into the types of behaviors, attitudes and goals your users have. It’s also important to mention that you can’t just examine what your users are saying to you — you need to tap into what they’re thinking and how they behave too.

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2) Analyze and organize your data into segments

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Once you’ve conducted your research, it’s time to analyze it. Look for trends in your results — can you see any similarities among your participants? Can you begin to group some of your participants together based on shared goals, attitudes and behaviors?

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After you have sorted your participants into groups, you can create your segments. These segments will become your draft personas. Try to limit the number of personas you create. Having too many can defeat the purpose of creating them in the first place.

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Don’t forget the little things! Give your personas a memorable title or name and maybe even assign an image or photo — it all helps to create a “real” person that your team can focus on and remember.

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3) Review and test

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After you’ve finalized your personas, it’s time to review them. Take another look at the responses you received from your initial user interviews and see if they match the personas you created. It’s also important you spend some time reviewing your finalized personas to see if any of them are too similar or overlap with one another. If they do, you might want to jump back a step and segment your data again.

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This is also a great time to test your personas. Conduct another set of user interviews and research to validate your personas.

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User persona templates and examples

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Creating your personas using data from your user interviews can be a fun task — but make sure you don’t go too crazy. Your personas need to be relevant, not overly complex and a true representation of your users.

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A great way to ensure your personas don’t get too out of hand is to use a template. There are many of these available online in a number of different formats and of varying quality.

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This example from UX Lady contains a number of helpful bits of information you should include, such as user experience goals, tech expertise and the types of devices used. The accompany article also provides a fair bit of guidance on how to fill in your templates too. While this template is good, skip the demographics portion and read Indi Young’s article and books for better quality persona creation.

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Using Chalkmark to refine personas

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Now it’s time to let you in on a little tip. Did you know Chalkmark can be used to refine and validate your personas?

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One of the trickiest parts of creating personas is actually figuring out which ones are a true representation of your users — so this usually means lots of testing and refining to ensure you’re on the right track. Fortunately, Chalkmark makes the refinement and validation part pretty easy.

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First, you need to have your personas finalized or at least drafted. Take your results from your persona software or template you filled in. Create a survey for each segment so that you can see if your participants’ perceptions of themselves matches each of your personas.

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Second, create your test. This is a pretty simple demo we made when we were testing our own personas a few years ago at Optimal Workshop. Keep in mind this was a while ago and not a true representation of our current personas — they’ve definitely changed over time! During this step, it’s also quite helpful to include some post-test questions to drill down into your participants’ profiles.

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After that, send these tests out to your identified segments (e.g., if you had a retail clothing store, some of your segments might be women of a certain age, and men of a certain age. Each segment would receive its own test). Our test involved three segments: “the aware”, “the informed”, and “the experienced” — again, this has changed over time and you’ll find your personas will change too.

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Finally, analyze the results. If you created separate tests for each segment, you will now have filtered data for each segment. This is the real meaty information you use to validate each persona. For example, our three persona tests all contained the questions: “What’s your experience with user research?” And “How much of your job description relates directly to user experience work?”

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bove, you’ll see the results for Persona #2. This tells us that 34% of respondents identified that their job involves a lot of UX work (75-100%, in fact). In addition, 31% of this segment considered themselves “Confident” with remote user research, while a further 9% and 6% of this segment said they were “Experienced” and “Expert”.

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These results all aligned with the persona we associated with that segment: “the informed”.

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When you’re running your own tests, you’ll analyze the data in a very similar way. If the results from each of your segments’ Chalkmark tests don’t match up with the personas you created, it’s likely you need to adjust your personas. However, if each segment’s results happen to match up with your personas (like our example above), consider them validated!

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For a bit more info on our very own Chalkmark persona test, check out this article.

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Further reading

   
• "From personas to user stories" - an article by Roman Pichler on how to discover the right stories and integrate them into a sprint.
   
• "Personas make users memorable for product team members" - Aurora Bedford looks at how personas support user-centered design throughout a project’s lifecycle.
   
• "Developing successful personas" - Luke Wroblewski presents notes from a talk by Tamara Adlin who outlines a set of practical ways to align stakeholder, developers, and designers to use personas.
   
• "Describing personas" - Indi Young looks at some of the problems in accurately describing personas.
 

Lately, I’ve found myself sitting in the participant’s chair at the UX research table more and more and it’s been an eye-opening collection of experiences. As UX researchers, we’re definitely not our users, but we are someone else’s. We use products, services and tools too! I’ve recently discovered that participating in user research not only helps out a fellow UXer with their qualitative research, but has also helped me grow my skills.

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Here are 3 reasons why you should try being a participant for yourself.

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1. Build empathy for the participant experience 🫶

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Having facilitated hundreds of UX research sessions over the years, I didn’t think I would be as nervous as I was going in as a participant! When we design our research sessions we don’t often give our participants a heads up on what we’re going to talk about because we don’t want to influence them for one, but truly not knowing what to expect made me feel slightly jittery. Before and at the beginning of these experiences, I felt quite unprepared. I wasn’t expecting to feel that way.

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During these sessions I often found myself wondering things like: Were my answers detailed enough? Will my responses be kept confidential? (I could never seem to remember if that had been covered in the introduction!). I worried that I wasn’t giving helpful responses or if I was talking too much. When misunderstandings arose in the conversation, I felt responsible and I was kicking myself for not communicating clearly enough!

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As a participant, I completely lost track of time during the session and developed an entirely new appreciation for timekeeping as a facilitator! I could have talked well beyond the scope of the interview timeframe and needed to be kept on track.

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I also very quickly discovered that thinking aloud is a lot harder to do than it sounds. It’s not a simple matter of verbalizing your thoughts as they happen. You have to think them, process them, decide how to verbalize them and then talk – all while someone (often a complete stranger) is looking at you expectantly and eagerly. It’s awkward and it feels weird. And look, it is widely acknowledged that it’s challenging and unnatural, but I didn’t fully appreciate or understand that until I was required to do it myself in a research environment.

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Did I experience some of these thoughts and feelings because I’m a UX researcher and I know what the other side looks and feels like? Maybe. It’s certainly possible and I’d be remiss if I didn’t call out this potential bias, but I do feel that having done this I now have a greater capacity to empathize with the participant experience. I’ve now been on the receiving end of the introductory spiel (and tuned out during it!), I’ve now got first-hand experience with the on-the-spot answering of those questions we carefully craft and I’ve scrambled for words when I’ve been asked to explain why I said what I said.

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These experiences have taught me that there’s a good chance the participant is just as nervous as I am and that a little reassurance or confirmation of usefulness goes a very long way. I’ve learned that regardless of the skill or experience of the researcher, interview questions can be super confusing and hard to answer. Having questions rephrased and being told that what I shared was helpful made me feel significantly more comfortable and able to think clearly and open up more - therefore providing more value to the researcher.

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I’ve also been itching to find out what happened next after the sessions ended. Was I helpful and in what way? Where did the insight I provided lead? I’ve learned that while we walk away with more questions, so might our participants and what can we do about that? We’re so busy, but stopping for a moment further down the track if/where possible to reach out and say ‘Hey, I just thought you might like to see what we did with all that great information you shared with us’ might be nice. It’s not always practical or possible and sometimes we have to wait until the thing goes live, but it’s food for thought.

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2. Learn from other researcher’s styles 📚

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Every UX researcher is different and we all have our own approaches and styles. As a notetaker for other researchers, I’ve always enjoyed having the opportunity to observe them in action, but somehow experiencing it as a participant felt different in the best possible way. It felt more immersive. Perhaps it was because I didn’t have to think about anything else or observe the participant’s reactions and was able to absorb every second of that experience as it was happening to me rather than in front of me.

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I participated in a usability testing session with two researchers - one facilitating and one taking notes - and the notetaker was so unobtrusive and quiet that I completely forgot they were there! They said a quick hello at the beginning of the session and then sat back behind me and blended in with the furniture and didn’t make a sound until they piped up with a question at the very end. Note taking is such a grossly underrated UX research skill. There’s a lot to think about, a lot to avoid thinking about (e.g., jumping into solution right there in the session) and of course we have to be mindful of the potential impact of our behavior on the participant, but this went beyond stifling disappointment or resisting the urge to speak. This was a dignified and seamlessly elegant note taker existence unlike anything I have ever seen.

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In other sessions as a user interview participant I was delighted when researchers injected multiple moments of humor into those previously mentioned introductory spiel snooze fests. It did more than just make me feel comfortable - humor helped me focus better on what was being said and remember important details during and well after the session had ended.

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I also learned a thing or two about comfortable silences when I participated in a contextual session with two researchers. One researcher kept prodding and repeatedly asking questions while the other exuded a quiet and calm demeanor and simply patiently waited for me to complete my task and talk about it in my own time (and way). It won’t work in all situations or with all participants, but it made me feel relaxed and comfortable enough to talk through what I was thinking and seeing. This approach also made thinking aloud easier for me.

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It’s important to remember that it doesn’t matter if you’re an experienced UX researcher or if you’re just starting out, everyone can learn something new from another researcher and stepping up into a session as an actual participant is a great way to do that.

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3. Give back and grow our industry 🌱

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One of my favourite things about the UX industry has always been its sense of community. We’re a group of people who care. We care about our users, we care about each other and we care about our capability as an industry and where we’re headed. Agreeing to be a participant in another researcher’s study is a great way to give back.

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As I mentioned earlier, we use products and services too and in addition to this, there’s a whole heap of them out there designed just for us! It makes sense that in the same way that we as researchers ask our own customers and users to help us design better products, we should be open to doing the same for the people who design for us.

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The cool thing about being a participant who is also a researcher is that we pick up issues other people might not. We might be a little tougher and less likely to let a usability issue slide. We might be the person that provides the external and fresh-eyed validation a researcher needs to convince a stakeholder that a design needs to be changed or worked on some more. A researcher in the participant’s chair is a powerful hybrid - it’s a participant and expert reviewer in one.

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As a general rule of thumb, if you’re invited to participate in another researcher’s study, I do think it’s best to always be upfront with them about who you are and what you do so that they can determine if you are potentially too biased to be included. It’s their study and informed consent matters. Think about what you would want as a researcher. And if they’re specifically asking you to participate because you’re a researcher - that’s awesome!

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So those are just some of the reasons why you should take a spin in the participant’s chair. Professional development is a lifelong learning process for us all. I’m looking forward to implementing what I’ve learned from these experiences and continuing to plonk myself in that participant chair to keep growing my perspective and helping out other researchers along the way.

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Happy researching (and participating)!