By Nate Brown
In user experience research, some of the most valuable insights are closer than one might think. Testing with external user panels is a valuable asset and can provide many great insights. However, sometimes it is necessary to bring your own participants to a user research study. Whether due to cost, ease of access, or even legality reasons, it is very likely that at some point in a UX researcher's career they will need to bring in their own participants. For the purpose of this article, “internal participants” will refer to users that are brought by the research team versus using an external recruitment panel or agency.
Today we will discuss the different aspects of BYOU (bring your own user) testing and the main things to know before sending out a study to real users.
Different Types of Internal Participants
Before jumping into the best practices of recruiting and preparing your participants, let’s understand some of the different places one can source internal participants from.
Customer Base - This is the ideal source of participants to engage with. They are the individuals who actually use the product or service of an organization. Feedback provided by a customer base is directly relevant to the goals of the business. Since user research is primarily used to build empathy with customers, why not hear from them directly?
Internal Employees - Testing with individuals within the organization is a great source of user feedback from people with experience and familiarity with the product. The best use case for internal employees would be research on internal assets like intranet systems and programs used only by employees. It can also be helpful to bring in coworkers when running pilots for large or important research studies before they go live.
Friends & Family - While feedback from this user base can be helpful and very cost-effective, this would probably be a last-resort option for user research. If you are faced with a tight or non-existent budget, pulling from people outside of the organization that you know personally can be helpful in a pinch. Do not rely solely on this type of user for research however, as it can severely narrow your field of insights.
Recruiting BYOU Participants
When recruiting internal participants, there are some specific things a researcher will need to consider. First, identify which user base the participants will be sourced from. Review the major user bases above as this will play a huge role in the type of incentives needed to encourage users to complete a session.
Incentives: The easiest way to get participants interested enough to stop what they are doing and participate in a research study is to offer them a financial incentive. This does not always need to be a cash incentive. Gift cards are an excellent incentive and Amazon cash is very popular with US-based participants. Another financial incentive can be discount codes to the organization's product store or offering. This is a good option for research teams who, for policy reasons, cannot pay participants cash incentives.
Once the team has decided on an incentive type, it’s time to identify the amount of the incentive. Note that the amount needed to successfully recruit participants can vary widely depending on the user base that is being drawn from and the participant’s level of sophistication. For example, a participant that is a Director of IT will cost a lot more than a B2C consumer that purchases the company’s products online.
Here is a quick breakdown of normal incentive amounts for the average BYOU participant that will provide a baseline for incentivization:
Research Types | Incentive Amount in USD |
Survey / Quant | $5 - $10 |
Unmoderated (Recorded) | $10 - $25 |
Moderated / Live Conversation | $50 - $100 |
In-Person / Onsite | $75 - $150 |
Now that the incentive amount has been decided, let’s consider how to get the participants in the study. There are two major forms of BYOU recruitment, active and passive.
Active Recruitment - The favored recruitment method for BYOU testing is active recruitment. This entails the research team finding participants and sending out invitations to the study. The team is likely using an existing customer list or opt-in sheet, but there are many places one could be sourcing a list of participants to engage for research. Many research platforms will provide a link for the study that the team can send to participants that will enter them into the session.
Passive Recruitment - The hidden gem of BYOU testing, passive recruitment allows a research team to "set and forget" a study and let the participants come to them. Normally done through landing pages or live intercepts, look for a research platform like Userlytics that can provide easy-to-use forms of passive recruitment. It is important to display the incentive amount near the widget or study link so participants know they will be incentivized to participate in the study.
Preparing a BYOU Participant
Everything is now ready to go! At this point, the researcher has identified everything needed for the BYOU session setup. All that is needed now is to start engaging participants. There are a few things that the researcher will want to do in order to prepare their participants for the session. Preparation will ensure a smooth onboarding process and encourage participants to give more insightful feedback. One thing to consider is that many of the users who participate in the research study have likely never done a research study before.
Here are a few tips to give BYOU participants before they engage in the research study:
Onboarding Advice: Is the team using a research tool that will require the participant to onboard into the session? Be sure to inform the participant of what will be required for them to enter the study. Quality research tools like Userlytics will provide you with text and video-based tutorials you can send directly to participants.
Tell Them What You Want: One of the biggest mistakes I see research teams make in unmoderated usability studies is that they do not tell the participants to speak aloud. Even if the user base being drawn from is experienced with research studies, instruct them to speak aloud before and during the research session. Apart from speaking aloud, be clear and concise in your instructions to the users in the study, especially if the asset they will be reviewing is unfamiliar like a partially-clickable prototype. There is an excellent piece on this in my test script creation article here.
Provide Support: As much as possible for the research team, be available to provide support to the users in the study. This is especially important with unmoderated surveys and recorded studies where the users are by themselves. Good research tools like Userlytics provide live support to all participants, but the majority of BYOU participants will still reach out to the research teams that initially contacted them for the study.
Over Recruit Participants: Regardless of the effort put in by a researcher to successfully recruit participants, it is often the case that a BYOU study will under-recruit rather than over-recruit users. Try to contact three to four times as many participants as needed for the study. Even if the researcher gets the number of users required for statistical significance, assume at least 25% of the results collected will not be useable for one reason or another.
The Take-Away
Bringing internal participants in for a study is often a cost-effective way to source participants for user research. Depending on what the team is researching, internal participants provide feedback from people who actually use or consume an organization's product or offering. But with the highs, come the lows. BYOU testing can sometimes be challenging from a recruitment standpoint or even simply getting the users to successfully complete the study. By following these guidelines, research teams put themselves in the best possible position to get valuable insights out of the internal users brought into their research studies.
If you have any questions or would like to discuss research strategy together, please feel free to contact me at nbrown@userlytics.com.
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