participants

Doing users studies is fascinating, once you get to the point of actually talking to the participants. But the step before, on recruiting them, can be a pain!
This (long) post is in response to Danny’s experience on recruiting using Facebook and Twitter ads. A couple of weeks after he did his recruitment ads, I asked him advice on how to reach a broader sample when snowball sampling and traditional word or mouth (i.e. posting for free on any social media and sending out emails) was not enough, and he recommended trying out Facebook and Twitter ads.

For my study I had to recruit English-speaking participants for an interview study on the use smartwatches, which could take place in person or on Skype. Users could therefore live anywhere in the UK. Because the Twitter ad did not lead to any participant signing up, I will focus this post on my experience with Facebook ads and at the end of the post there are some useful take-home considerations.

So I created a Facebook ad (you can see Danny’s post for a step-by-step process on how to). The ad linked to a website, where people had to complete a recruitment survey, before they were contacted to take part in the interview. Here you can see a summary of my recruitment criteria and some overall results:

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