43 ways to find participants for research
One of the biggest bottlenecks of research and a topic of unjust misconceptions is finding people who will participate in research. It’s a bottleneck because without participants there is no research. A common misconception is that finding participants for research is hard, costly, and time consuming, almost an unachievable goal, especially from the perspective of those who never conducted research with people.
The following is a list of several dozen options of ways to find participants for studies. As you can quickly see, some ways are relevant for consumer-facing products, some for business-to-business ones, some are easy, others hard, some are free, and others will cost a lot. In any case, you have multiple ways for finding participants.
- Ask people who work in the organization that develops the product. For example, ask employees who are not part of the product/design team), or work with departments that can reach out to their product active, potential and or inactive users. If relevant, ask the UX group of a company from which you might want to find participants for research.
- Ask family and friends of people who work in the organization that develops the product.
- Ask to recruit from a friend’s large pool of potential participants as a favor.
- Partner with another…
