Referrals as user research recruitment tool
Ever had the situation where you post a well crafted, easy to react to, message to your users’ channel in a messaging app of their choice to ask for volunteers for user research and the response rate is an absolute zero? Or send an email to a group of potential interviewees and get no responses?
People don’t react when referred to as a group. In emergency situation training they tell you to address a single person and tell them to call the ambulance. Ask ‘someone’ to do that and no one will. The same applies to user research participant recruitment.
Asking a user directly is a lot more powerful strategy than a group message and can be amplified even further with a referral.
Referral structure
This is the basic structure of a referral:
“We’re testing new features. We talked with Person X and she said that we should talk to you as well. Would you have time for a 60-minute interview with us?”
It doesn’t even matter who Person X is, as long as the referral is true and they know each other. It helps if they’re a supervisor, a friend or a known expert on the area you’re testing.
You can extend the basic structure to provide more context and information as needed, but that’s not always necessary. I’ve got a hypothesis that the other content, like what you’re actually testing, doesn’t matter that much. People almost instinctively respond to recommendations of people they trust.
Asking for referrals
Part of the background work for any design project is figuring out who the users are on a very practical level. The product owner, the client or other main stakeholders usually have a few trusted users in mind if you ask them. These are usually too involved in the previous development effort. If you dig a bit further, you’ll get a short list of a) users who they don’t talk to often or b) who might know more users. The first list has already potential users for interviewing. The second list is the people you ask referrals from.
You can also ask for more specific referrals. If you know you’re lacking users e.g. in a certain country or a certain user group, you might ask if they know anyone from those areas. This way you can broaden your pool of users.
As you’re interviewing users, at the end of each interview ask them for referrals. Ask if they know any other people you should talk to on this subject. That will fill out your list.
It’s useful to keep notes of all the possible interviewees, who referred them and who did you interview. The referrals also give you a good idea on where to ask for referrals in the future.
Caveats
When using referrals, you’re borrowing the credibility and trust of the referee. If the interview you perform isn’t well prepared or relevant to the user, you’re not only doing a bad job. You’re also abusing their relationship with the referee. Don’t waste the trust you’ve been given.
Using referrals can also cause selection bias in your research. Be careful to cover different areas of your user base by asking referrals from different people. Combine it with different ways of user recruitment. If you notice participants referring each other, you know you’ve reached some kind of saturation point.