As promised, we are back with more content inspired by the industry survey we ran at the end of 2023. A couple of months ago, we asked hundreds of UX and user research professionals to answer a short survey so we could try to understand the challenges these professionals are currently experiencing around user recruitment and research management.

This blog is the second in the series and today we will focus on the pros and cons of using self-serve user recruitment platforms as a source of participants for user research and testing. If you’d like to read the first blog, click here.

In our survey, we asked how the respondents have been sourcing their participants for user research and, unsurprisingly, found that the same professional or team will use a variety of recruitment methods depending on their needs, available budget and timeline. Here’s a summary:

 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.

The professionals’ preferred platforms

We then asked our respondents which platforms were their go-to tools for user recruitment when doing it themselves. The results are:

🥇 In first place we have UserTesting as the industry’s favourite.
🥈 In second place we have User Interviews.
🥉 And, finally, in third place we have Askable.

Besides asking which platforms they use, we also asked the professionals who replied to our survey their opinions about these tools. In this series’ first blog, we shared a summary of these advantages and disadvantages, but in this blog we go a bit deeper into the topic.

The pros…

Professionals using self-serve user recruitment platforms love how quick the turnaround is when recruiting using these tools. 30% of respondents highlighted this as the main reason why they used self-serve platforms.

This is followed, in second place, by the low cost of using these tools, with 21% highlighting the budget-friendliness as a big pro. To add more context, overall across the survey there was a big focus on sticking to budgets and keeping user recruitment’s costs low at a time when some budgets are getting trimmed, so the fact that this reason ranks so highly makes a lot of sense in the current context.

The platforms’ user-friendliness comes in third place, with 13% of professionals selecting this as a plus. Other advantages mentioned by our respondents are the complete control over the recruitment process, great customer service provided by some of these platforms and the quality of the participants.

… and the cons

No one can deny these self-serve user recruitment platforms can be a great solution in some cases, but there’s also cons to keep in mind, according to our respondents. The main concern for 21% of professionals is the low quality of participants, followed by a lack of control over the recruitment process (18%) and a lack of transparency regarding the participants’ recruitment history (13%), for example.

More specifically, 5% of respondents thought that the inability to screen out participants based on their past participation was a major disadvantage when using some platforms. Similarly, 9% said that the possibility that the participants could unknowingly be over-recruited was a big concern. Poor customer service and the inability to target niche audiences such as B2B groups were also highlighted as issues.

A major challenge for the professionals that use these tool is “avoiding participant fatigue”, especially if using only a couple of platforms and focussing on a specific niche audience.

Our respondents also stated that it’s “often hard to meet specific criteria”, “find the relevant profiles” and ensure the diversity of the participants recruited. We wrote about the downsides of using self-serve platforms in more detail back in 2023, so go and have a look.

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.