How to Recruit Product Testers for Your Remote Design Sprint (on Facebook and Instagram)

Everybody is always excited about the idea of getting users to play with their product, but how can you find these users and get them to sign up for your tests?

In this video, we will walk you through how we recruit users for product testing on Facebook and Instagram.

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Transcript

Hi everybody, this is Robin here from Parallel.

At Parallel, we conduct Design Sprints with our companies, and doing user tests is a very, very important part of running Design Sprints. Product validation is the whole reason to run Design Sprints, and that's one area that people often struggle with.

Everybody is excited about the idea of getting users to see their prototypes and gaining some insights from that. But the thought of going out and recruiting users often just seems like a lot of work.

How do you find them? Where do you find them? How do you onboard them?

That's what we're going to be talking about in this video.

Why should you do user tests remotely?

At Parallel, we do all our user tests remotely.

Sometimes it feels like, remotely, you might not be able to gain enough insights or get people to be comfortable. But it just works really fine for us. In fact, it helps us gain access to a larger pool of users than we would be able to access physically.

Also, it just makes things very flexible and no-frill, for us to us to be able to do this very often, and it not becoming a big overhead on, "Oh, we need to do user testing, it's a big task."

For just trying to make it very easy and comfortable so that we can do it whenever it's needed, remote works great.

How can you recruit the right users? 

Now let's get to, how do you go about recruiting users online for your product test — using the internet and platforms like Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn — to find people who really match your customer profile and run product tests with them?

Step 1: Define your users

Before you start searching for users, the first thing that we need to do is define who these users really are. Because we're going to be searching them online and targeting them, we need to be really clear with their profile and their demographics.

Start by defining, who is your ideal customer? What's the demographic that you're looking for?

Things like, what's their age? What's the profession they are in? What are the typical kind of things that they like?

Step 2: Choose an incentive

The second thing is to figure out, what is the incentive? If somebody is willing to volunteer 45 minutes out of their time, trying to use your product and give their insights, there has to be something in it for them.

We've had really good experiences with offering people $50-100 USD Amazon vouchers, depending on the country and location where you are.

Step 3: Find your users

Now you have a very clear incentive. You also have a clearly defined audience. So before you start creating an ad or reaching out to them, the first thing you need to think about is, where are these specific people hanging out on the internet?

Are they part of some specific groups? What kind of content are they consuming or posting? What kinds of brands do they like? What kind of people are they following?

There are two ways in which you can reach out to them.

One is by creating hyper-targeted, paid advertisements on platforms like Facebook or Instagram for B2C. Sometimes, if you're targeting somebody really niche, you can use LinkedIn for that.

The other way is to look for them in interest groups on Facebook or other platforms.

We've had really good success with both — posting it on groups, in case we have very clear interest areas, and otherwise running Facebook ads. We typically have got really good responses within a few hours of posting the advertisements online.

Step 4: Create the right ad

Let's look at how your posted ad for this should look. There needs to be 3 key components to the ad.

The first part is a clear, catchy headline that describes what you're looking for and the reward, in one line.

The second part is a picture that represents that you're doing some sort of product user testing, so that it attracts the attention of somebody who's interested.

The third point is a very clear description that describes, what is it that you're looking for? How will this work? What is there in exchange for them? And details like that.

Step 5: Create a form for users

Now that we have our ad ready, the next part is a form that they'll be filling in. This is where you capture their contact details for you to connect with them after they have submitted the form.

You need to ask them questions that will help you decide whether you've found a person who's the right fit for your product testing or not.

Instead of just looking at it like a very basic form with name and email, it's important to look at it like a survey. It should not be something that's very brief, and it should not be something very long. It should have enough details for you to really understand if this person, who has reached out to you for this product testing — is that person the right customer? You should be able to profile them.

Apart from this, you also need to check with them if they are available on that specific date or time that you're looking to run your user test; and if they have the basic set-up required for running this user test.

It should be a good internet connection, a laptop, and perhaps a working webcam. We've had a lot of surprises sometimes when we don't ask these questions. We've had people turn up with an audio-only connection.

Step 6: Choose your users

Your ad is ready. Your survey form is ready. Go ahead and publish it. Within a matter of a few hours, you should start to get some responses. Be patient. Sometimes it takes a day for you to get good responses.

Now, when you have some good responses, look at them in a spreadsheet. Start looking at your profiling questions, see if they're the right fit for your particular product test, and start scheduling the calls with them.

One good piece of advice would be to always have some extras in mind when you're scheduling them. Because, in spite of all the qualifications and the reward in place, there are people who, for different reasons, are not able to make it.

Stay in touch 😀

I hope this was helpful, and all the best for your product testing!

If you have any questions about what we discussed here, let us know in the comments.

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