Who to recruit

The goal of any usability study is to understand whether the target users of the product are able to use it with ease, and whether they would like to use the product in the future and will recommend it to others.

Participants whose profiles are the most similar to the target users will therefore provide the most relevant feedback. Imagine running a study on a retail website that targets people who are 50 years of age and older. Feedback from millennials may not be very relevant, since younger people interact with technology differently than older people do. For instance, millennials might not comment on the font size, color contrast, and readability of the site, even though these are likely pain points for some older users.

Or, imagine a product used by nurses to monitor patients in the intensive care unit of a hospital. If the study participants don't have the relevant work experience, they will be hard-pressed to provide meaningful insights into the ease of using the product.

A company that wants to roll out an E-commerce site in a different country should plan to use local study participants in order to understand the ease-of-use and the users' expectations, and to confirm that the site is localized appropriately in order to ensure user engagement. Users in Japan, the US, the UK, and Brazil, may all have different expectations.

As mentioned in the previous chapter, target user profiles can be broad and vague, including groups like seniors or millenials. In order to recruit a representative set of participants, however, the UX researcher and the stakeholders must agree upon a more specific definition. For instance, the age range for seniors must be agreed upon. This alignment will ensure that the screener effort will be efficient. We will cover the screener later in this chapter.