With one electric vehicle (EV) registered every 60 seconds over the summer 2023, PFR has been tasked with recruiting a growing number of current and potential EV owners over the last few years. One of People for Research’s clients interested in this audience is a UK-based organisation keen to tailor their recruitment strategy to understand these users’ experiences and motivations when acquiring and using an electric vehicle as part of their daily lives.

We asked the client to describe the project in their own words:

“We tasked PFR with recruiting people who currently own electric vehicles to understand their experiences throughout their ownership. We wanted to know more about the participants’ purchasing experience, what kinds of information they looked for at this time, what their motivations were to get an EV, how they use their EV, how they charge their vehicle at home and what effect might this have had on how they manage their home energy, as well as experiences with public charging points.”

“We invited participants to have an informal video chat with us where we asked them questions that covered these topics, and just wanted to hear the honest truths about their lives with an electric vehicle.”

The PFR team was able to successfully deliver dozens of participants for several rounds of research, despite some added complex criteria. The client required some of these participants to recall their purchasing journey in great detail, so our team had to find recent EV owners who had just purchased their new vehicle, as well as take into account other socio-demographic factors like household income, location, marital status and number of children, while also attempting to achieve a balance in terms of gender and ethnicity.

The client initially planned to run face-to-face sessions, but PFR advised that running the research remotely was more likely to provide the desired diversity and ensure that some of the more niche and time-poor participants would still be able to take part. The recruitment strategy was constantly evolving and adapting following these regular updates and the advice provided by our team.

We asked our client a few more questions about the service provided by PFR.

How would you describe working with People for Research?

Overall we have been really impressed with the level of engagement we had from PFR throughout the project, from helping to define our recruitment specification through to recruiting participants and supporting us on the day of research.

PFR supported us with evolving our recruitment strategy as we learned more about the participants signing up [to our services], and ensured that we maximised the best spread of our target participants as possible.

How did you find the experience of running this specific research remotely?

When we went into this we were worried that it would be harder to engage with participants digitally. We couldn’t have been more wrong – instead we gained great value from talking to the right people, especially as our research was initially just planned as a face-to-face conversation. Perhaps engaging with them from the comfort of their own home allowed them to open up more about their experiences too.

We also found that running remote research enabled us to access participants who we may never have spoken to otherwise; particularly if we ran in-person sessions which would generally be limited to the bigger towns and cities for accessibility.

This meant we could talk to a far greater pool of people, and better understand the real experiences of electric vehicle owners from all pockets of Great Britain – even Jersey!

What was your favourite aspect of the research?

The best part is when we hear participants say something that we hadn’t heard or even thought of before – and then it’s a lightbulb moment for us. This is something we can only get from actually engaging with real people. Hearing about the challenges and barriers they face throughout the process provided us with tremendous insight into their perspectives.

We also loved hearing how enthusiastic many people were about owning an electric vehicle and hearing how it was just a part of making their whole homes environmentally friendly!

Looking for more client testimonials? Here’s another one!

If you would like to find out more about our in-house participant recruitment service for user testing or market research get in touch on 0117 921 0008 or info@peopleforresearch.co.uk.

At People for Research, we recruit participants for UX and usability testing and market research. We work with award winning UX agencies across the UK and partner up with a number of end clients who are leading the way with in-house user experience and insight.