As we are gearing up for the end of 2023, our team decided that the best way to close the year and get ready for 2024 would be to run an industry survey with hundreds of UX and user research experts to try and better understand the challenges these professionals are currently experiencing around user recruitment and research management.

This blog is the first in a series of articles that will analyse the results of our survey more in depth. Today we will give you an initial summary of the results we collected, but keep an eye out for the content that will follow.

Let’s start with some background on our participants. While most of them are based in the UK, we also have some representatives from the United States, as well as other countries like Australia, Germany, Brazil, India, Norway, Sweden and even Hong Kong. There’s also a good mix of in-house professionals, agency workers and freelancers. Finally, all of our respondents confirmed they were actively involved in organising and/or running user research sessions.

2023’s impact on budgets

After the initial demographic questions, our survey asked the participants what type of research sessions they have been running in 2023. While the big majority of participants are running remote 1-2-1 research, less than half are still doing in-person sessions; roughly two thirds are running unmoderated research and a third are running focus groups.

But are user researchers and UXers doing more or less research this year compared to 2022? 

✨ For half of the respondents, the amount of research they ran in 2023 stayed the same.
➕ For 30%, it increased.
➖ For the remaining 20%, it decreased.

What about budgets? Did the threat of a recession have a massive impact on the funds allocated for research before the year began?

✨ 34% of respondents confirmed their research budget was the same as in 2022.
➕ 27% of respondents said their budget actually increased in 2023.
➖ 20% suffered a budget cut this year, which directly connects to the 20% of respondents who reduced the amount of research they are able to run.
🤷 20% weren’t sure about this or would rather not answer the question.

One respondent that had their budget reduced said they are being forced into “negotiating the profile with clients more”, while others claimed that a smaller budget means “less external engagements and less international research” and “reduced scope for discovery programmes” which leads to more risk.

How is user recruitment happening?

We asked how the respondents have been sourcing their participants for user research in 2023. Unsurprisingly, what we found is that the same professional or team will use a variety of recruitment methods depending on their needs, available budget and timeline.

🏠 71% are doing their own recruitment in-house, some of them dipping into their own user panels and customer lists or recruiting from their end clients’ customer pools.
🧑‍💻 34% are using self-serve platforms such as User Testing, UserZoom, etc.
💡 64% are using the services of specialist third-parties like People for Research.

“A specialised partner such as PFR still plays a valuable role in the recruitment of participants, particularly for exploratory research or where the audience is hard to reach,” wrote one respondent.

Next, we wanted to know what are the industry’s favourite self-serve platforms, with UserTesting and UserZoom landing first place in the list of preferences. Other well-liked industry tools are Askable, TryMyUI, UsabilityHub, User Interviews, Userlytics, UXTweak, Validately and others like Prolific, Pollfish and UX Signals.

We wanted to drill down on the pros and cons of using self-serve platforms. Let’s start with the advantages of using these tools.

▪️ The biggest pro highlighted by 30% of the respondents is quick turnaround and being able to find participants for user research as quickly as possible.
▪️ Next we have cost, with 21% stating that a big reason for using these platforms is the low cost when compared to using the services of a third-party.
▪️ The user-friendliness of these platforms and ease of process is in third place (13%).

Moving on to the cons.

▪️ The top concern for 33% of respondents when using self-serve platforms is the potential low quality of participants and the possibility of participants being over-recruited, as well as the inability to screen out based on past participation.
▪️ These issues are followed by the lack of control over the entire process, with 18% highlighting this as an issue.
▪️ 13% state they are concerned about the lack of transparency around these platforms’ processes.
▪️ Other issues include poor customer service, poorly built platforms or features and inability to target and find niche audiences, like senior professionals in the B2B world.

“Self-serve platforms don’t cover all audiences we need to recruit for, especially in the B2B/professional user space,” said one respondent.

What about in-house recruitment?

With over two thirds of respondents stating they do all or some of their recruitment in-house, we wanted to know more about the challenges and advantages of this type of recruitment. We will write more about this topic on a separate blog, but here’s the summary.

➕ Big advantages are the low or no cost of recruitment, quick turnaround and a “better understanding of our users,” said one of the survey participants. Also, “we can ensure recruited users have been using our products,” wrote another respondent.
➖ Major cons are being able to find diverse participants, the fact that the recruitment process is extremely time-consuming, and more specific challenges such as handling GDPR and the collection of personal data or figuring out how to legally conduct research with minors.

According to one participant, “recruiting young people is a big challenge. Recruiting a range of customer types is also a challenge – we tend to skew toward those who work from home, or don’t work, and miss out on those who have unusual work patterns, or work a lot/are too busy to take part in research. Managing recruitment, comms, incentives, attendance, etc. is a big time sink for us as we don’t have dedicated roles to do this.”

What about recruiting via your clients’ panels? “I often recruit via/with clients, so there are lots of challenges! Mainly helping them to understand the challenges of doing their own recruitment, the time needed to do this, the process, and facilitation required to get suitable participants who turn up. Clients often have bad customer data.”

In this blog, we share some tips to help with in-house recruitment!

We are very thankful to the UX and user research professionals that took the time to complete our survey, helping us better understand the current challenges around research set-up, budgets and user recruitment. The survey is still open, so if you work in the industry and have a spare five minutes, you can find the survey here. As promised, we will soon publish more content around this topic, which will go deeper into the results of the survey. Stay tuned!

Maria Santos, Head of Digital Operations & Data Protection

If you would like to find out more about our in-house participant recruitment service for user research or usability testing 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.