Services Strategic Planning Identify research participants

Identify participants

Finding the right participants to take part in user research is one of the most critical stages of any user engagement project. It’s often under-valued, but participant selection has a direct impact on the usefulness of your findings. If the people involved don’t reflect the real needs, behaviours or circumstances of your users, the insights you collect, no matter how well the session is run, can end up being misleading or unusable.

Why participant selection matters

So, gathering data from poorly selected participants not only wastes time, but also business resources. Teams can spend weeks running research that fails to deliver meaningful results because the participants don’t match the audience the product is actually for. On the other hand, identifying participants who genuinely represent your users improves the reliability of your findings and makes research sessions far more valuable.

What identifying the right participants delivers

Good participant selection gives you access to perspectives that reflect the real-world context your product operates in. You’re not just hearing opinions, you’re seeing how people with relevant experiences, motivations and expectations actually engage with your designs.

Typical outcomes include:

Insights that apply across key, different user segments and experiences
Stronger alignment between product decisions and user needs
Accurate persona matching
Minimises risk of wasted resources
Engaged & reliable participants

Ultimately, selecting the right participants increases the clarity and impact of your research. It ensures you’re solving the right problems for the right people and not chasing issues that don’t exist, or missing the real pain points that do.

Our approach to participant identification

Every project begins with a clear understanding of who the research is for. We help define user segments based on real-world personas, behavioural patterns, or roles within a wider system. From there, we determine what kinds of participants are most appropriate for the research method being used.

Depending on the project, this might involve:

Matching participants to well-defined personas or user groups
Ensuring a spread of perspectives across different demographics and usage contexts
Recruiting edge cases or niche users to challenge assumptions
Targeting people based on key behaviours, such as those who’ve dropped out of a process or frequently contact support

When and how this service is used

Participant identification is relevant wherever research or user testing is involved. This includes:

Early-stage concept testing
Usability testing of new or existing interfaces
Longitudinal studies like diaries or recurring check-ins
Surveys and quantitative validation
Co-design or participatory research sessions

The exact criteria we use to define “the right participant” will vary depending on what’s being tested and at which stage the research is being conducted, but the core principle remains: the people you include in your research should reflect the people your product is for.

Improving outcomes through thoughtful recruitment

We approach participant identification as an integral part of the research process, not an administrative step or a box to tick. The same level of attention we give to planning sessions or analysing findings goes into ensuring we involve the right people, and this is why our research outcomes are so effective.

We understand that getting this part right means more reliable and relevant data down the line. It reduces the risk of skewed results, avoids wasted effort and costs, and increases confidence in the decisions that follow.

FAQs

Why not just test with whoever’s available?

Testing with a convenient sample, like colleagues or friends, risks producing biased or irrelevant results. Real users behave differently, have different expectations, and often surface issues that internal teams can’t predict. Recruiting the right participants ensures your findings reflect real-world usage.

Can you help us recruit if we don’t have access to users?

Yes. We work with trusted recruitment partners and platforms, and can handle the full recruitment process if needed, from screener design through to participant management. We can also advise on how to recruit from your own channels, such as mailing lists or social media.

How many participants do we need?

That depends on the method and the goals. For moderated usability testing, five to eight users per group is often enough to surface key patterns. For quantitative validation, larger sample sizes are needed. We’ll help define the right numbers and segments based on your project’s scope.