Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium Morgan Gore

A technical-ish framework for making recruiting and coordination a non-issue at any scale

Research Synthesis at Grove

A day full of interviews can fly by, often with actionable insights shortly after. Yet, getting enough users to commit to and show up for a round of interviews is more than half the battle. Recruiting and coordinating user interviews doesn’t have to be a bottleneck . The right framework will limit the time and cost of getting a project off the ground.

Why recruiting & coordination is part of your job

User Research is core to a user-centered product development process. Here’s how you can position research as a value add, instead of a bottleneck.

This is not an article on why you should be doing research, but how you can create an efficient process that keeps the focus on the results, and not the logistics.

Recruiting Participants

Defining Criteria

As you draft your research plan, you should be defining the participant criteria. For example, you may want to talk to abandoners, existing users, or people who have never used your product. For our most recent research project, we wanted to speak with users who met the following:

Status: Existing, Active users
Orders: 1+
Recency: Had an order processed within the last 60 days

Using SQL as a UXR tool

There are many methods you can use to pull participants who match the criteria set. You can work with your customer happiness team to connect with users who have written in, partner with your marketing team to set up an email drip, troll for NPS Promoters/Passives/Detractors, or tap into analytics tools like Mixpanel/Heap and Looker dashboards to pull participants. Lee Monroe of Mesosphere outlines his teams process using intercom + an opt-in form in his article.

Our tool of choice is SQL explorer, an open-source tool created by our CTO Chris Clark. Using SQL has simplified the process by allowing us to write queries that match our pre-defined participant criteria.

Tess Rothstein, Design Researcher at Medium, echoed the value of tinkering with variables in SQL queries to better match participant criteria in her article, which inspired us to show a little more of this process.

Using SQL Explorer to pull research participants

We used the query above to pull a list of 600 users who matched the criteria that we set in the planning phase. For this project, we pulled user id, first name, email and count of orders, and restricted the results to users who had their most recent order processed within the last 60 days.

Once you have a decent query set up, you can play around with the variables to adjust, expand or restrict the recruitment set for different projects. For example, we can change the last shipment date from ‘ 60 days ’ to ‘ 25 days ’ to ensure users pulled have been active more recently. Or, if you need to send out a massive survey, you can increase the row limit.

Coordination

Emailing Research Leads

The next step is exporting the list of users and pulling them into a Google Sheets doc which we use like a CRM for managing interview participants. Once we’ve imported the leads into Google sheets, we use an extension called Yet Another Mail Merge to send out our recruitment email. YAMM has a few basic tracking features that allows us to see opens/clicks. With that information, we can edit or adjust our sends to make sure we get the responses we need.

If you’re planning to do this at scale, I would suggest more mature software or services, but this has been suiting us well for our purposes.

Scheduling Interviews

In our recruitment outreach, we include a links for users to self-select times to chat to further automate the process. For direct phone interviews, we include a link for users to schedule time via Calendly, which prevents the back-and-forth of trying to coordinate various schedules.

This is what happens when you send out a Calendly link and don’t set a daily event max.

For our most recent project, I neglected to set the “event max per day” and I ended up with the most frightening — or epic depending, on how you look at it — 2 weeks of research interviews on my calendar. Lesson learned.

Once a user chooses a time slot, they are then added to the “master scheduling doc” which is our most important reference doc throughout the project.

Pre-work to minimize no-shows

To minimize the occurrence of no-shows, we email participants 1–2 days before their scheduled time slot with a polite reminder. If we do run into a no-show, we wait 5 minutes before calling back. If they don’t answer, we’ll leave a message and follow-up via email to (a) reschedule or (b) ask if it’s ok to keep their info on-hand for the future.

Follow-Up

After a successful interview, it’s time to follow up with the user via email. Thank them for their time and credit their account or take care of any incentives you may have offered.

If they’ve been particularly interested and provided valuable info, ask to keep their info on hand for future projects. This will help build a go-to group of users if you ever need to reach out to them for ideas or quick feedback.

A well-oiled machine

To recap, you’ve defined your participant criteria, pulled a list of research leads, semi-automated your scheduling process and packed your week with high quality interview participants (of course, you set a max-per-day so you didn’t obliterate your own schedule). Now, rinse and repeat as necessary.

As a Product Designer, Product Manager or User Researcher, putting care into the recruitment & coordination phase of user research is critical if your goal is to maintain efficiency in your process, and it will pay itself off in short order. The method outlined above is fairly scrappy, and I’d argue that something similar is achievable with little budget — If your team currently doesn’t invest in User Research, I challenge you to get creative and set up a process that works for you.

Once you’ve created a repeatable process that scales, it’s easy to adjust it relative to your needs on a per-project basis and prevent recruitment from being the bottleneck of your research process.

Further Reading

If you liked this article, leave some 👏’s or share with your team!

Thanks to Molly Yee, Annie Stimson, and Annee Belanger for helping make user research as seamless as possible at Grove.

I’m a product design manager currently building a team and driving design culture at an e-commerce startup. Follow me on Twitter Instagram or Dribbble!

Ps. I’m hiring designers!

<a href="https://medium.com/media/b85dfbb5286d8a25cf2e754b9462cf45/href">https://medium.com/media/b85dfbb5286d8a25cf2e754b9462cf45/href</a>

Creating a UX research recruiting & coordination engine was originally published in Prototypr on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Creating a UX research recruiting & coordination engine

Cool stuff, every week

More Articles