How to Reach the Best Users to Test Your Product?
You have a prototype, a design you want to test. How do you get users to test it? Whether it’s a design sprint or a huge UX project, whether we want to validate product-market fit or we want to test usability, we always require fresh relevant eyes to look into our design and give us candid feedback. Our projects significantly vary from B2C to B2B from wide consumer apps to special corporate niche products. This creates huge challenges when searching for properly segmented users to test with.
In this article, we provide seven super valuable tips for you to reach the users for your product testing.
1.Pay
Our first tip is to pay your testers. Don’t expect people to just volunteer for your testing. They are giving you a huge value by sharing their time and should be compensated for that. Depending on the region and scarcity of your users, payment can go from $25 to $200 per user. You can also use Amazon gift cards because everybody seems to like to get them.
2.Only 5 Users For Test Process
You don’t need so many users. Research done by the Nielsen Norman Group shows that five users will usually get you 80% of the feedback you need. Any additional user may give you some input, but you will probably get that from usage data or other more efficient means than user testing. However, from our experience, these five users beat any other form of feedback in terms of impact.
3.Advertising
Many people overlook the option of putting money into getting users mainly because they assume it will be quite expensive. But the fact is that it does not have to be. It depends on the users you are looking for. If it’s B2C, then you can do great with Facebook or Craigslist and get as many as 50 users with just $25.
4.LinkedIn
If you have a targeted B2B audience, you may find good luck in LinkedIn. You can either advertise on LinkedIn’s paid ads or directly approach people using in-mail and offer them to participate. In both methods, you can easily target your users by job title and skills. Make it a perfect tool for user recruitment.
5.Use Facebook Groups To test
If you can, contact the group moderators or influencers and ask them to place a post for you. If you offer a paid benefit, they will usually be happy to help. This will also be a good networking opportunity within your targeted audience.
6.Segment Wide and Qualify
It is usually a good idea to segment wide on advertising and send your users to a complementary qualifying form like Typeform, google forms or Facebook lead form. The reason behind this strategy is that wide segmentation usually results in cheaper clicks and qualifying forms are usually free. It also helps you to prioritize users better and ask more in-depth questions before you show the users your design.
7.Networking and Existing Clients
Some users are really hard to find especially, C-level people or rare job titles. In these cases, you should be using existing clients and personal networking. It is generally recommended to avoid testing with people you are familiar with them as this may cause bias in the process. However, it is better to use biased users than not test at all.
Personal connection is also a good idea. Ask your friends to ask their friends and their friends and try to get as many people as you can. Remember, you only need five.
Conclusion
For companies facing the challenge of bringing rare users on an ongoing basis, we would recommend finding 3-5 design partners. Companies that are clients or may become clients. They will become part of your development process and help you get users. In any case, never skip user testing.