Finding participants for user research
Participants are the people you recruit to take part in your research. For your research to be effective, your participants must be actual or likely users of your service.
It’s also important to do research with all the different kinds of people who may need your service, including those who:
- are disabled or use assistive technologies
- have limited digital skills or poor literacy
- may need help to use your service
Identifying your target groups
First, identify all the different types of people you need to include in your research. Use existing data to help you do this, including:
- social research reports
- government and industry statistics
- service performance data and analytics
- survey results
- user profiles and personas
Define your recruitment criteria
Your recruitment criteria should clearly specify the people you want to participate in your research.
Depending on your service and the research you plan to do, your criteria might include:
- a particular demographic - for example, young people aged 16 to 24
- a specific target user group - such as small business owners or job centre staff
- a particular experience - for example, people who have recently moved home or applied for a government grant
- a problematic situation - such as people who’ve lost an important document
- particular ways of accessing your service - for example, those who rely on a screen reader, use speech recognition software, or who only access the internet at a library or day centre
Outside of any specific criteria, always try to recruit a spread of people by:
- age
- gender
- ethnicity
- disability
- social and economic status
Review your recruitment criteria with your team to make sure you’re recruiting the right people to answer the questions you have.
Numbers of participants
The research methods you are using will determine the number of participants that you need. For example, you would typically have between 4 and 8 participants for a round of interviews or usability tests.
Choosing the best approaches to find participants
To recruit participants you can:
- use a research recruitment agency
- work with a professional body, specialist charity or community group
- invite existing users of your service to take part
- find people at a venue on the day
- engage with colleagues to recruit relevant staff
Using a recruitment agency
Agencies are generally best for recruiting the general public.
A good recruitment agency can find participants quickly and reliably, typically taking 10 days to get participants. You’ll need to provide them with a recruitment brief. Work closely with the recruitment agency to make sure they fully understand and can meet your brief.
Ask any potential supplier what experience they have in recruiting disabled participants. When you’ve appointed them, you can give them disability screeners that can include the requirements you need for your research to help them recruit the right participants.
Finding disabled participants or participants who use assistive technology might take more time. You should allow up to a month to find participants.
The Digital Marketplace includes frameworks that you can use to help you find a supplier. If it’s not appropriate to use these, you should follow your organisation’s processes for selecting and appointing suppliers.
Working with a third-party organisation
Approaching relevant professional bodies, charities and community groups can often be an effective way to recruit specific types of participant. They should have good relationships with the people they recruit.
The staff and expert members of these organisations can be useful sources of information. But make sure that the members you recruit for research are representative of the actual and likely users of your service.
Inviting existing users
People are often interested in helping to improve services they use. So existing users can be a good source of research participants.
Make sure you have users’ permission before you send them invitations to take part in specific research activities. For example, you might describe some improvements you are looking to make in a service newsletter, and provide a way for users to register their interest in research. Or you might ask users who provide feedback whether they are interested in taking part in research.
Finding participants at a venue
When you are doing pop-up research, you recruit participants on the day, at the venue. Make sure you have permission to be there and to distribute information about your research.
To recruit participants:
- go to a place where your target participants are likely to be (for example, a library, college or community centre)
- use banners and fliers to advertise your research
- encourage people to take part, but do not put anyone under pressure
Engaging with colleagues
The guide on designing services for government users has information on which internal users you should research with.
Avoid using your own staff for research into the public facing parts of your service. Their knowledge and experience can mean they will use the service in a very different way.
Providing an information sheet
Research sessions are more effective when participants are well prepared and comfortable. This is why we recommend that you provide them with an information sheet that describes your research before you meet them for the session.
Protecting participants’ privacy
As part of recruiting participants and managing research sessions you will normally collect and use data about participants. For example, contact details like their names and addresses, and their answers to screening questions.
You will need to manage this personal data carefully to protect participants’ privacy.
Make sure you:
- collect and use the minimum information you need
- share participants’ details only with colleagues who need to use them
- delete participants’ details as soon as you no longer need them to manage their participation in your research
Giving incentives
It’s normal for members of the public to get an incentive in return for their time. You should also consider compensating third-party organisations who help you find participants.
How much this is will depend on the type of participant and the length of the research session. You can ask agencies for advice on how much you should give.
You may need to pay extra expenses to help disabled participants take part in research - they may need a helper, taxis or someone to help with communication like a sign language interpreter.
Avoid handling cash incentives yourself. Recruitment agencies can send the incentive directly to the participants. If you’re recruiting participants yourself, you can use appropriate vouchers. Check with your department if you’re not sure what’s appropriate.
Alternatively, recruitment agencies can provide a ‘host’ to manage your participants and hand over incentives on your behalf. There is usually an additional cost, so factor this into your research budget.
We recommend giving participants their incentive at the start of their research session. This avoids any suggestion that participants have to respond in a particular way to get their incentive, and means you can end a problematic session without having to deal with the incentive.
Recruiting disabled participants
You need to include disabled participants in your user research. Even if you do not have disabled users currently using your service, it’s important that you do not put up barriers to people who might want to use it in future.
To get the most value from your user research, you should find disabled participants who already use your service, or a closely related one.
If this is not possible, try to find disabled participants who are potential future users of the service, who have used it in the past, or are familiar with the needs of real users.
If you cannot find disabled participants with direct experience of the needs your service is trying to meet, it is still essential to test it with users with an appropriate range of disabilities. In this case you will have to prepare participants for the task so they understand the circumstances of real users and can complete the steps.
Conducting recruitment for disabled people
When recruiting disabled participants, check if they want or need:
- to be contacted in a particular way - for example, people who are deaf or hard of hearing may prefer emails or text messages to phone calls
- any communication support - like a lip speaker or sign language interpreter
- to use any assistive technologies, like a screen reader or speech recognition software - if they do, it’s usually easier to visit them at home or work
- printed materials, like the consent form, in a particular font size or format
- any help getting to or from the research venue
- to meet at a particular location - find out more about choosing a location
If you’re using a recruitment agency or third-party organisation to find participants, make sure you can still find out what assistance participants need.
You can ask the user research community which agencies, charities and other bodies they’ve used successfully.
One way to find participants is to contact organisations or agencies that work with disabled people. These organisations can be protective over their users so it is important to:
- be clear about what is required
- clarify the steps participants may need to take and how you’ll support them
- build a relationship with the organisation and be respectful of their time and resources
- make contact with organisations or communities at least a month before usability testing
If you’re recruiting participants with less common cognitive disabilities, establish contact with organisations at least 6 to 8 weeks before usability testing. This is because it can be harder to find enough participants to test your service.
Some people with access needs do not identify as having a disability and it is important to be aware of this in the screening process. You can take this into account by asking questions about difficulties that participants may have. For example, reading small text or navigating through a page.
How to find disabled participants
You can ask organisations or community groups if they can promote your research in their forums, social media, newsletters or comms.
For business-facing services, you can promote internally or across government using posters around the office, comms or networks.
You can also use accessibility firms to help you find participants you can include in the research. These companies can give you access to people who use different types of assistive technologies, although they may not be familiar with your service. You can find these types of accessibility services through the Digital Marketplace.
If you’re getting an accessibility audit (as the Service Standard requires you to do at beta), you can ask the auditors to help you with usability testing for accessibility as well.
You can ask the user research community which agencies, charities and other bodies they’ve used successfully to recruit disabled participants and participants with access needs.
Things to avoid
It can be challenging to find enough disabled participants. However you should avoid:
- using internal disabled users to test the usability of external services or systems
- over relying on the same participants continuously across different research projects
These participants can get too familiar with the research process and this can skew your results. It is not fair to use too much of their time for research, especially if it’s not their day job and if you can find more participants elsewhere.
Avoiding bias in recruitment
It’s hard to recruit an unbiased sample of user research participants. This is because you’re likely to include some people and exclude others depending on:
- what the research activity is
- when the sessions are scheduled
- where you’re doing the research
- how you are recruiting the participants
The best way to limit this risk is to use a variety of user research activities and recruitment approaches.
For example, if you’re using an agency, make sure they do not exclude disabled people or people with limited digital and literacy skills. At the same time, check they do not over-recruit people with flexible work patterns.
Examples and case studies
How we recruited people with low or no digital skills on Carer’s Allowance.
Related guides
You may also find the following guides useful:
- Last update:
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We've updated the guidance to include more information on recruiting user research participants with disabilities.
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Clarified guidance on including participants with disabilities.
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Guidance first published