As product managers, we all know the struggle of truly understanding our users. It's the cornerstone of everything we do, yet the path to those valuable insights can often feel like navigating a maze. The endless back-and-forth emails, the constant asking for favors from other teams, and the sheer time spent trying to find the right people to talk to, sound familiar? For years, this was our reality. But there’s a better way, Optimal's participant recruitment is a game-changer, transforming your approach to user research and freeing you to focus on what truly matters: understanding our users.

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The Challenge We All Faced

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User research processes often hit a significant bottleneck: finding participants. Like many, you may rely heavily on sales and support teams to connect you with users. While they were always incredibly helpful, this approach has its limitations. It creates internal dependencies, slows down timelines, and often means you are limited to a specific segment of our user base. You frequently find ourselves asking, "Does anyone know someone who fits this profile?" which inevitably leads to delays and sometimes, missed crucial feedback opportunities.

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A Game-Changing Solution: Optimal's Participant Recruitment

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Enter Optimal's participant recruitment. This service fundamentally shifts how you approach user research, offering a hugely increased level of efficiency and insight. Here’s how it can level up your research process:

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• Diverse Participant Pool: Gone are the days of repeatedly reaching out to the same familiar faces. Optimal Workshop provides access to a global pool of participants who genuinely represent our target audience. The fresh perspectives and varied experiences gained can be truly eye-opening, uncovering insights you might have otherwise missed.
• Time-Saving Independence: The constant "Does anyone know someone who...?" emails are a thing of the past. You now have the autonomy to independently recruit participants for a wide range of research activities, from quick prototype tests to more in-depth user interviews and usability studies. This newfound independence dramatically accelerates your research timeline, allowing you to gather feedback much faster.
• Faster Learning Cycles: When a critical question arises, or you need to quickly validate a new concept, you can now launch research and recruit participants almost immediately. This quick turnaround means you’re making informed decisions based on real user feedback at a much faster pace than ever before. This agility is invaluable in today's fast-paced product development environment.
• Reduced Bias: By accessing external participants who have no prior relationship with your company, you're receiving more honest and unfiltered feedback. This unbiased perspective is crucial for making confident, user-driven decisions and avoiding the pitfalls of internal assumptions.

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Beyond Just Recruitment: A Seamless Research Ecosystem

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The participant recruitment service integrates with the Optimal platform. Whether you're conducting tree testing to evaluate information architecture, running card sorting exercises to understand user mental models, or performing first-click tests to assess navigation, everything is available within one intuitive platform. It really can become your one-stop shop for all things user research.

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Building a Research-First Culture

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Perhaps the most unexpected and significant benefit of streamlined participant recruitment comes from the positive shift in your team's culture. With research becoming so accessible and efficient, you're naturally more inclined to validate our assumptions and explore user needs before making key product decisions. Every product decision is now more deeply grounded in real user insights, fostering a truly user-centric approach throughout your development process.

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The Bottom Line

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If you're still wrestling with the time-consuming and often frustrating process of participant recruitment for your user research, why not give Optimal Workshop a try. It can transform what is a significant bottleneck in your workflow into a streamlined and efficient process that empowers you to build truly user-centric products. It's not just about saving time; it's about gaining deeper, more diverse insights that ultimately lead to better products and happier users. Give it a shot, you might be surprised at the difference it makes.

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Recruiting high quality participants can be a hassle and time-consuming. That’s why we’ve relaunched Optimal Recruitment with expanded profiling capabilities, enhanced quality controls, and full-service support—to let you focus on what matters most: powerful insights to drive better business outcomes.

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What does Optimal Recruitment offer?

With Optimal Recruitment, our in-house team makes it easy to connect with participants. We take care of all the details—from feasibility checks, recruitment, reminders, confirmations, and admin.

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Thanks to our four award-winning panel providers, we can tailor recruitment to every recruitment need, giving you access to a vast pool of high-quality participants from across 150+ countries.

• User Interviews: Rated the #1 top-rated panel software on G2, fully dedicated to quality user research
• PureSpectrum: Recognized as the Market Research Supplier of the Year
• Respondent: Ensures a consistent 95% participants show-up rate
• Cint: Winner of the Data Quality Award, 2024

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And this is just the beginning—our network will continue to grow, offering even greater targeting capabilities and expanded reach in the future.

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How does it work?

All you need to do is provide your participant criteria and our team will handle the rest! We’ll select the best panel for your needs and ensure everything in your study is set up perfectly so you can sit back and watch the results flow in. 
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Ready to dive in?

To get started, head over to the Recruit tab under an Optimal study.

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Need more info? Find out more about getting started or reach out to Support or your account team for more details.

We’re excited to share some new features and product updates that we've rolled out lately and what’s coming up next.

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What's new…

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Speeding up task analysis in Treejack 🚤

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Customer feedback and research have shown that users analyse results in Treejack in a task-by-task manner. To better support this way of working, we’ve updated Treejack results to ensure the success and directness of each task are easier to compare with the new Task overview tab in Results.  This new visualisation is available in Results > Overview> Task overview section in Optimal Workshop.

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Aggregate path views 

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We have also introduced the aggregate paths view in the Paths tab (it used to only be visible via the compare tasks button). This allows users to more easily see what the popular paths are for each task and how much each successful path was used (or not). 

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Over the next few months, we’ll continue working through our results tabs to update them to a task-by-task view and highlight insights at a task level. 

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Improving the quality of participant recruitment

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We’re continuing work to improve the quality of participants recruited in Optimal Workshop. Our latest release involves eliminating all participants that rush through a Treejack study.  We’ve analysed years of participants to get a good idea of what ‘rushing’ means, and we can now identify these ‘speeders’ and remove them from our participant pools. We have also removed the limit in-app for replacement participants across all study types, and released updates to immediately eliminate poor quality participants from custom orders. 

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Help guide: How to replace study participants in-app

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What’s next:

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• Identifying participants that rush through other tools and remove from participant pools.
• Build more automated flagging and behaviours to eliminate other behaviours that indicate poor-quality participants.
• Continued monitoring and analysis to ensure high participant quality.

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Templates are here 🙌 

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We are excited to announce our first six project templates are now available. Templates have been created with industry experts to give you the confidence to quickly launch studies and back your results to make data-driven decisions.   These ready-made templates give you a headstart on your research by providing you with the right range of study types and when to use them. 

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Where will they live?

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Templates are accessible in the app from the Dashboard > Browse Templates. From the ‘templates menu’ select a template that matches your use case for example ‘I need to organise content into categories’ and get going faster than before. You can edit and customise the templates to suit your research goals. 

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More templates from our community

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This is just the beginning of our template journey and while we continue to build up our collection we’d love your input too. If there are templates that you regularly use and think the community could benefit from we’d love to hear from you. Email us at product@optimalworkshop.com.

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What’s coming up…

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Optimal Academy 🎓

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The Optimal Academy is due to launch in later this month.  The Academy will provide education that enables our customers to get started faster with our tools and elevate their knowledge of all things Information Architecture and UX. 

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The first courses available will be a series of Optimal Workshop tool-based lessons, including best practice study setup analysis and recruitment.  You can expect to see more exclusive content and courses from industry experts and institutions on a diverse range of topics continuing to drop in 2023 and 2024.

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Enterprise team features

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We’re committed to making things easier for our team customers, particularly on the administration side of our product. Our product team have begun discovery on improving our administration features, and have had a lot of great customer feedback to help shape up the opportunities. We are aiming to make improvements to this area of the product later this year.

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.

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With the right strategy, you can source exactly the right participants for your next research project.

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We share a practical step-by-step guide on how to find participants for user experience research.

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The difficulties/challenges of user research recruiting 🏋️

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It has to be acknowledged that there are challenges when recruiting research participants. You may recognize some of these:

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• There are so many channels and methods you can use to find participants, different channels will work better for different projects.
• Repeatedly using the same channels and methods will result in diminishing returns (i.e. burning out participants).
• It’s a lengthy and complex process, and some projects don’t have the luxury of time.
• Offering the right incentives and distributing them is time-consuming.
• It’s hard to manage participants during long-term or recurring studies, such as customer research projects.

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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.

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Who are the right participants for different types of research? 🤔

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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:

• What is the purpose of our research?
• How do we plan to understand that?

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2. Define who your ideal research participant is. Who is going to have the answers to your questions?

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3. Work out your research recruitment strategy. That starts by understanding the differences between recruiting for qualitative and quantitative research.

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Recruiting for qualitative vs. quantitative research 🙋🏻

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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.

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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.

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How many participants do you need? 👱🏻👩👩🏻👧🏽👧🏾

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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).

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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.

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User research recruitment - step by step 👟

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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:

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1. Identify your ideal participants

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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.

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2. Screen participants

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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.

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3. Find prospective participants

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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.

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4. Research incentives

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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.

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5. Scheduling with participants

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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.

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Tips to avoid participant burnout 📛

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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.

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There are 2 ways to avoid this problem:

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1. Use a huge database of potential participant targets.
2. Use a mixture of different recruitment strategies and channels.

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Of course, it might be unavoidable to hit the same audience repeatedly when you’re testing your product development among your customer base.

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Wrap up 🌯

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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. 

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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.

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Check out more here.

We take a look at three qualitative research methods which can be started quickly with a bit of planning, and minimal participants while delivering great data insights.

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What is qualitative research? 🤔

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The term ‘qualitative’ refers to things that cannot be measured numerically and qualitative research is no exception. Qualitative research is primarily an exploratory research method that is typically done early in the design process. It's useful for uncovering insights into people’s thoughts, opinions, and motivations. It allows us to gain a deeper understanding of problems and provides answers to questions we didn’t know we needed to ask. 

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Qualitative research can be viewed as the 'why' versus quantitative user research which uncovers the 'how' or the 'what' users want. Qualitative user research helps us uncover why people make decisions (and potentially much more).

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Here's three qualitative research exercises you can start today:

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1. Usability testing 👨🏼💻

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Usability testing is a research method designed to evaluate how easy something is to use by testing it with representative users. In most cases, this ‘something’ is a prototype of a website or interface. Or it could just as easily be an existing website or product that requires more understanding of how it is currently used to identify faults or issues.

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These tests typically involve observing a participant as they work through a series of tasks involving the product being tested. It’s a good idea to bring a notetaker along, so you can focus on asking questions. After you’ve conducted several usability tests, you can analyze your observations to identify the most common issues.

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This can be a very practical start to the user research process. Observing, questioning and noting how a user interacts with your product in a very real environment can offer up some fantastic insights. 

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How many participants do I need to get started?

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Usability testing is done in a real world environment which means you need your participant to complete tasks on a laptop or mobile phone. Ideally this is in a controlled environment, an office or space that can be managed. Usability testing relies on the facilitator being present. So, to start you only need five participants which helps as it isn't too many people to find and set up.

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What to note: Usability testing is a great way to get an understanding of how exactly the participant interacts with the product. Note how they complete tasks, where their frustrations may be. Also look beyond what they are saying and observing what they are doing.  This is invaluable to get the full picture of how they feel and analyzing the user experience.

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2. Contextual inquiry 👀

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Contextual inquiry is the observation of behaviours and reactions when users undertake specific tasks. By observing and paying attention to unspoken communication, you can uncover insights into behaviour and even expectations.

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Giving the participant a set of tasks and observing how they complete these can be quite enlightening. Often what we do can be quite different to what we say we are doing. 

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By noting all of this during the testing session, and keeping our notes factual, they can provide context for why the participant may have changed their decision in a task or even abandoned it entirely.  Ensuring that you don’t try and infer why they are feeling a certain way, and how that may influence their decisions is important to gaining insights.

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How many participants do I need to get started?

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Like usability testing this method only needs a minimal one-on-one environment to get started.  A facilitator sets the test and observes the participant interacting with the product. You can start with as few as five participants, which means getting started with qualitative testing can be very quick to implement.

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What to note: How they move or act while they complete tasks.   Do they cross their arms, scratch their head or  even sigh?  Little things like trouble using the keyboard, can be implicit in how well they interpret the website.

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3. User interviews 👩🏻💻📓✍🏻💡

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User interviews are one-on-one facilitated conversations that are used to gain in-depth understanding of behaviours, opinions, and attitudes towards a product.

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Building a relationship with the participant can be valuable, allowing the conversation to flow, and remove barriers. Interviews are an excellent opportunity to ask questions as well as dig deeper into the detail.   They allow for follow up if further clarification be needed. Interviews are usually semi-structured with a list of open questions that are flexible enough to allow the interviewer to cover the required topics but also go wherever the conversation leads. 

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Interviews are also quite flexible because they don’t necessarily have to be conducted face to face. If time and resources are tight, they work just as well over the phone or via skype. Sessions can be recorded through note taking audio or video recording.

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If you want to find out more about how to do a phone interview, have a read here. 

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There can be a flow over of observational insights. This can be as simple as noting throughout the session, how they react to certain set tasks. Are there moments that they are frustrated? Do they turn back and look for another way? Or do they seem irritated by the hardware, the laptop, mouse or even the reflection on the screen? All valuable (unspoken) information on how and why the participant makes decisions.

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How many participants do I need to get started?

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As with our three qualitative research methods you need a minimal number of participants to really get started with user interviews. They rely on a facilitator that does one-on-one interviews with a set of predetermined questions. You can start with as few as five participants, and depending on the research they can be from inside or outside your company. But they should be as relaxed, and natural as possible, to allow for real responses and observations.

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What to note: User interviews are far more conversational than the previous two methods. You should have a script to work from, which will intend to uncover why your participant will want to work with your product a certain way. However, the interview allows some flexibility, with the facilitator able to dig deeper if needed, or change tack. Note the flow of conversation, and the various responses, as well as observed behaviours in a factual way.

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Reviewing your research 🕵🏼

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After completing your session it is just as important to review it. Spend the time while it’s still fresh in your mind filling in any gaps in information by reviewing the audio and/or video. Great note taking is vital and using a digital note taking software (like our very own Reframer) can make the whole process much simpler and easier, to record, review, analyze and share your data.  If you want more tips on how to take great notes in qualitative user research have a look at this.

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Delivering your data 🎁

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So, you’ve gone ahead and researched your product and you’ve got some amazing insights and data. What now? You need to pull it all together in a cohesive manner that breaks down what you’ve discovered and what it means. If you use our digital note taking software, Reframer, this can be fairly straight forward and streamlined. Having all of your notes, audio and video recordings, timestamping and observations in one place will allow the data to be generated and reviewed (and shared) swiftly. Pull together a report that can be shared among key shareholders and product managers. Present it in a way that allows your insights to clearly show where changes are needed, or improvements to the user experience can be made. It’s hard to argue with well researched data!

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Wrap Up 🌯

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If you always thought that qualitative research was too hard, or took too long, think again. Take a look at the Optimal Workshop platform and we can help you through the whole process, taking the pain out, and putting the insights in. 

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Ready to get started finding out how your users really interact with your product? Get started now, and lots of our products mean you can start today!

Design has a problem — historical and still pressing — of only designing for users that are easily accessible, are able to participate, or who meet some pre-determined idea of a ‘target’ or an ‘average’ user.

This is bad for organisations, who are missing out on a huge segment of the people they’d like to reach, and it’s bad for users, who can feel shut out of the services they’d like to access.

Remote research allows you to address common diversity and inclusion challenges of in-person research, and create a better product or service as a result.

Occupational diversity

While you’re probably already making considered attempts to include a diverse range of participants, the reality is that many people are simply not able to participate in research.

Some people cannot make it in to your research facilities for an hour on a weekday for an in-person interview — not now and not pre-pandemic either. That list includes single parents and other full-time carers, who are overwhelmingly women. (It’s also likely to exclude people with mobility challenges and certain chronic illnesses.)

One of the greatest strengths of remote research is that it enables asynchronous responses, which means people can fit it in whenever it makes the most sense for them. This makes it easier to research with shift workers, night owls, and people in precarious contract work, who may not be able request time off.

Geographic and cultural diversity

Research is mostly good at including people that are nearby, with spare time, and with the means to come and go as you require them to; they’ve got to fit with your schedule and your project plan. 

Planning your research to be remote by default allows you to work with and around these constraints in ways that will improve the validity and richness of your data and insights.

As an example, Paper Giant recently worked with Atlassian to conduct research with knowledge workers. Using remote research methods, we were able to speak to people in workplaces from multiple countries in North America, Europe and Australasia. This is far more representative of Atlassian’s user base than if we had only interviewed participants local to us, and helped us avoid treating Australia’s workplace culture as universal.

Neurodiversity 

Remote research also allows you to speak to people who might be uncomfortable with the intensity of a one-on-one interview in unfamiliar surroundings.

For example, autistic people commonly report finding eye contact overwhelming, but no one quite makes direct eye contact on video calls anyway, so this is one less thing they have to manage.

Body language is harder to interpret over a video call, which means remote research works best when it doesn’t rely on non-verbal cues. This equalises the process for everyone.

Research shows that non-native speakers, people with auditory processing disorders and people with high anxiety “often prefer text channels so they can have more time to process messages and craft responses.”

Inclusion challenges

Inclusion is a challenge as well as an opportunity when you’re using digital tools for research — such tools rely on digital literacy and digital infrastructure that people might not have. It’s worth remembering here that remote research doesn’t have to be digital. It can mean a phone call; it can mean sending something through the post.

This means you need to know who your users are and take into account any kind of access or inclusion issues they may have. For example, when Paper Giant has worked with participants with low literacy, we’ve designed comics as a way of getting people’s feedback on stuff rather than relying on words — those can be sent through the post. We’ve also used Easy English principles in documents for people with acquired brain injury.

Many people are only turning to remote research now, as a response to COVID-19. But it would be a mistake to view it as the fallback option. Remote research allows you to engage a much broader diversity of participants, leading to richer and better validated insights.

Paper Giant writes about research, design, innovation and ethics in our fortnightly newsletter – subscribe here.