Screening and finding usability test participants

Learn more about how to establish a group of usability test participants and find the right people to participate in your usability tests.

Establishing your usability testing group

Screening and finding participants is the first step of the unmoderated usability testing workflow.

Think about your community as a whole and the diversity it represents. Chances are that some members are better suited or more willing to participate in usability testing than others. It's a good idea to identify who those members are before launching your usability test. That way, you have a group of members whom you know you can engage for initial and subsequent usability testing.

When you're putting together your usability testing group, think about their availability, willingness, consent, and aptitude at this sort of testing.

  • Have they expressed interest in participating in usability testing in the past?
  • Do they consent to being recorded?
  • Are they comfortable with verbalizing their thought processes out loud?
Tip:
  • You already have lots of information you can leverage for screening: Profile variables, data from past activities, information from third-party systems that has been added to the Alida platform. Having an insight community means you are not starting from scratch with screening. Review what you already have, what you can leverage, and where you need to fill in the gaps with your screening survey.
  • When you are screening for your usability testing group, consider what combination of answer choices will ensure that you include, rather than exclude contributors. Erring on the side of including rather than excluding people can help you ensure that your participants represent all of your key user groups.

Educating and enabling your usability testing group

For many community members, usability testing is a completely new experience compared to survey responding. Certain steps may surprise members while they are setting up their screen, camera, and audio recordings, making them more likely to disengage. They may forget to talk out loud while completing the task. The prospect of appearing on video may intimidate them if they are not feeling or looking their best.

Use the screening survey as an opportunity to teach participants what usability testing will be like before the activity. In the screening survey:
  • Provide as much information and detail as possible. For example, For example, "We would like to see how easy or difficult it is to find a specific shirt on our website. As you're navigating through, we'd love to hear your thoughts as you go so we'll be asking you to speak aloud to share what you're doing and why, and what you think of the experience."
  • Sometimes participants hesitate to provide a video response if they don't feel good about their appearance or their environment. Inform participants that before the usability test, they can fix themselves up, tidy up, or move to a different room if they want and come back another time when they feel camera-ready.
  • At the end of the explanation, say, "Ready to try it yourself? Click Next." Add a Recording action and Usability Task question after that.
  • In the Usability Task question text, include another reminder to speak out loud during the exercise so that it stays visible and onscreen.

Flagging your usability testing group with profile variables

Once you've screened for which community members are ideal usability testing candidates, flag them with a profile variable. This will make your usability testing group easily identifiable later. As time goes on and you distribute more usability testing activities, you can also use profile variables to flag your usability testing group by experience level.

Screening for a specific usability activity

When you're screening for participants for a specific usability activity, think about the activity's goal and target audience. Be as specific as possible when you're answering these questions.

  • Are they available to participate during the timeframe the activity is open?
  • Which demographics are you trying to reach?
  • Which tasks do you want your audience to complete?
  • What is the desired timeframe for task completion?

Based on your answers to these questions, you can formulate a statement (for example, "We want to assess the usability of our product for 50-60 year old customers to complete checkout within 3 minutes"). This will help guide your research and analysis.

Tip: Aim for approximately 5-20 good responses when you're screening for participants for a specific usability activity.

Ideas for screening

How you conduct screening is up to you. Here are a couple of ideas to get you started:

  • Option 1: Create a separate screener survey that precedes the usability activity.

    In the screener survey, add a Recording action that precedes a small task for participants to do; this will record participants' screens and, if desired, audio and video. Alternately, add a Video Feedback question that records participants speaking on camera. You want to identify which participants are comfortable with talking out loud, being on video, and articulating their thought processes. Flag these participants with a Usability Testing Group profile variable.

  • Option 2: If you have surveys that are about to be distributed, add a question at the end asking participants if they're interested in being contacted about usability testing in the future.

    Track their responses using a Profile action. That way, you have a record of interested community members.

  • Option 3: Add screener questions and survey logic to the beginning of your usability activity to disqualify participants.

After you have found your participants, the next step is authoring your usability testing activity.