Part 2 (of 5) of the Qualitative UXR Playbook series
Previously in Part 1 of The Qualitative UXR Playbook series, we explored how to set UX research up for success by crafting well-defined research goals within a structured framework. These goals serve as a compass and scaffolding of any qualitative study, ensuring focus and alignment across your team. Now, in Part 2, we shift focus to the next critical phase: Planning for instrumentation & recruitment, ensuring you’re equipped with the right tools, participants, and strategies to conduct effective, User-centred interviews.
Deciding on instrumentation
Match methods to objectives
Choose tools and techniques (instruments for data gathering) aligned with your defined research goals. For exploratory insights, I highly recommend doing User interviews. If it’s for validation on something small and specific, opt for usability testing or A/B tests. Online tools like Airtable or Dovetail streamline data collection, supporting collaboration ands reporting insights to teams.
Choosing the right tools for User interviews
Let’s touch on choosing the right tools to capture insights effectively and manage recruitment efficiently. At a minimum, you’ll need the ability to record sessions in both video and audio formats to revisit conversations later. Pair this with reliable note-taking tools, whether an online transcribing tool or traditional pen and paper. Most participants typically agree to video session recording, which is ideal, especially if you don’t have a teammate as a note-taker.
Shaping your ideal participant profile
Your User interviews will only be as effective as the people you recruit. Your ability to select the right participants who’s the right fit for your studies can “make or break” your study.
- User personas as the guiding light: Use established proto-persona boards to visualise your ideal participants. For instance, your primary persona’s key goals, motivators, frustrations, tasks, and quotes should certainly guide you on who to recruit.
- Just enough diversity: A diverse participant pool ensures your design can cater to a wide range of User needs and experiences. Avoid over-representing one User type. 2-3 User personas consisting of a Primary persona with a few Secondary personas is recommended for striking the right balance between diversity and focus. Ask: “Which personas are most impacted?” and “Are we considering enough diversity in our sources of data to represent the User sufficiently?”.
“Personas are not just a deliverable; they are the lens through which every design decision is made.”
– Kim Goodwin
Recruitment strategies
Let’s weigh up the 2 varying approaches to recruitment:
Do It Yourself (DIY) or In-house recruitment
Quite often you may be in a position to access a vast pool of potential interview participants, for example an existing customer base. Leverage internal resources like customer databases, social media, or mailing lists. You are using whichever tools available to manually pre-screen and screen people for selection. The best-case scenario is to have built up a participant pool in advance (opted in to participate), so you have a ready list of potential Users to tap into when research needs arise as it takes weeks/months to get to that stage.
- Pros: Cost-effective and gives you more control over participant selection.
- Cons: Time-intensive and may limit diversity or reach.
External agencies online
Circumstances of time and resources may limit your options to do it internally. Then, services like Respondent or User Interviews provide access to pre-screened participants all online. Their service to you is to match the right people to your studies. It comes at a cost, typically ranging from 60-80 USD per match (business models vary with agency fees). On top of it, you need to consider the incentives/fees to be given out to each participant which would cost similar to the agency costs.
- Pros: Faster recruitment and access to a broader, more diverse participant pool. They offer built-in screening options, allowing you to focus more on the interviewing process rather than logistical hurdles
- Cons: Higher costs and may be limited to the reach of the agencies’ existing pool of people to choose from.
“Recruiting the right participants is the most critical step in user research. Without the right participants, your data is meaningless.”
– Erika Hall, Just Enough Research
Incentives and asking for consent
- Offer fair incentives: Budget for appropriate rewards, such as Amazon gift cards, cash, or discounts, that reflect the time and effort participants contribute. For example, 50–100 USD/EUR for a 60-minute interview is expected in recent times
- Prioritise transparency: Clearly communicate the purpose of your research, obtain informed consent, and protect participant privacy
Create a high-level timeline
Plan a timeline with milestones for recruitment deadlines, interview schedules, and buffer periods for no-shows. It’s typical to expect a 20–25% no-show rate, so over-recruit to prevent gaps. This structured plan ensures research is purposeful, inclusive, and efficient, driving meaningful insights for design decisions.
Chunking research into waves/rounds
Smaller but focused studies
Breaking research into smaller & more focused rounds allows a systematic approach to uncovering and validating insights. For example, a UX team of 2-3 requiring to interview 12-15 people; they may split this into 2 rounds anticipating that a follow-up is required. Or after a round of interviews, they decide that they’d need to speak with another set of participants of a User persona /profile who they’ve discovered were key.
For sizeable projects which require foundational or exploratory research done, it’s typical to have multiple series of rounds (or waves as I like to call them). For example, a wave may consists of 3-4 rounds each and need to be conducted in different junctures in the product development cycle. Take for example, a “blue-sky” (brand new product with a new customer base) may require 3 waves with multiple rounds, they can look like below:
Wave 1: Foundational insights
Focus on broad understanding, gathering key data about personas, User goals, and pain points. Typically is to explore and understand the “what” which the products needs to address to solve.
- User personas should reflect real User needs and frustrations
- Foundational research should be exploratory—stay in the “problem space” before proposing solutions.
“If we want to create products that serve people, we must first understand those people—their motivations, their goals, and the context in which they operate.”
— Alan Cooper
Wave 2: Deep dives into specific scenarios
Explore specific areas of the specific components of User journeys / sub-journeys and uncover detailed pain points or challenges. It is focused on contextualising the who, why, and when.
- Let User goals, context scenarios, not features, guide this phase
- Use targeted questions to expand on patterns from Wave 1.
Wave 3: Validation
This is focused on evaluating how well your team is doing in designing/developing the concept of the product. Test concepts or prototypes against User feedback to ensure alignment with User needs, ultimately providing insights on the “how”, what works vs what doesn’t.
- Validation must confirm designs reduce friction and meet goals.
- Through iterative testing and refinement, teams can develop truly User-centred solutions.
Assign roles beyond the research team
It goes without saying but inviting and engaging our colleagues in Tech and Business (not limited to) for all the workshops we’ve covered in essential. This covers from mapping Proto-personas, User journey maps, research goals, etc. As you’ve likely discovered by now, teammates in the Customer Service or Success departments interact with real customers daily, making them a valuable source of data for your UX studies. Many would agree that they are already engaged in UX activities—often unknowingly—simply through the nature of their tasks in supporting and engaging with customers.
The more we are advocates of co-creation and view our cross-functions as key partners in UX activities, the better we are poised to building right solutions for Users. In the stage of User interviews for example, engage cross-functional colleagues in tasks like note-taking or observation to reduce bias and foster shared ownership.
In closing…
By defining participant profiles based on User personas, selecting the right methods or instruments to gather your data, and planning recruitment timelines thoughtfully, you’ve now have the key fundamentals in your UX research plan to guide you in your studies. Typically unexpected issues arise, but having a plan would accelerate your remediations undoubtedly.
Coming up in this series, Part 3: Listening to Learn will dive into some essential practices to crafting quality questions and environments to create rapport with your interview participants.
This was Part 2 (of 5) of the Qualitative UXR Playbook series.
- View Part 1: Qualitative UXR Playbook
- View Part 3: Mastering the Art of User Interviews: Listening to Learn
Recommended further reading
- Just Enough Research by Erika Hall
- Designing for the Digital Age by Kim Goodwin
- About Face: The Essentials of Interaction Design by Alan Cooper, Robert Reimann, David Cronin, and Christopher Noessel
- Contextual Design: Defining Customer-Centered Systems by Karen Holtzblatt and Hugh Beyer
- Interviewing Users: How to Uncover Compelling Insights by Steve Portigal
