Quality participants lead to quality insights. The quality of your participants is an important thing to consider when you start recruiting. You want people who are as close to the right demographics as possible, and willing to take the activity seriously.
Ideally, you’ll have around 30 participants complete your prototype test so that you can see trends clearly and account for variations and outliers.
However, you can still get plenty of useful insights with fewer participants, so even if you only have a limited number of participants, running a prototype test is still worthwhile to validate your designs and keep you moving forward.
You can recruit participants in a bunch of different ways, and how you do so will depend on a few different factors. If you have access to a pool of participants (like employees if you’re working on an internal product, or your customer mailing list) then sending them an email invitation, along with an incentive or chance to win a prize, can be a useful way to get responses. Similarly, you could invite people via your social media channels or add banners to your website.
Keep in mind that if people don’t receive an incentive or are not obligated to participate, you’ll need to invite a whole lot more people than your minimum required.
If you’re recruiting participants via the above sources, we always recommend using a screener survey to make sure you only receive responses from participants who meet your criteria. You can read more about creating a screener survey here.
You can also make use of high-quality recruitment panels, which can be effective if you want fast, pain-free recruits with minimal effort. You can recruit participants from quite specific demographics, and be confident that the participants will take your study seriously (they are getting paid, after all).
After you’ve launched your test, you’ll be given the option to recruit participants via the Optimal Recruitment panel from within your account. The On Demand panel allows you to target by demographics including age, location, gender, occupation, and education level and is best for large-scale studies. From the Recruit tab in Optimal you can enter your required demographics and receive an instant quote based on the types of participants and the complexity of your study. After hitting 'place order’, you can sit back and watch the results come in while you get on with other work.
If you have more complex participant requirements we recommend our Managed Recruitment our team will work with you to ensure your study is set up correctly so participants can complete it seamlessly, giving you faster completions and reliable results.
Our team of recruitment experts manages every detail — feasibility checks, recruitment, participant confirmations, and incentives — so you can stay focused on analysis and insights.
Prototype testing can be a new concept and activity for people, so your instructions must be clear and concise. Prototype tests come with default instructions that we’ve found are easy for people to understand, but you can tailor them to suit your participants or the particular features of your test.