Engaging Research Stakeholders and Participants

Please note: This content reflects industry best practices. We’ve provided links to third-party resources where appropriate.

Identifying and Engaging Stakeholders

Even the best UX designers can’t design a perfect user experience in a vacuum. Internal experts and end users can provide valuable firsthand information that propels UX research further. They can even join in as research participants themselves. Having the support of stakeholders is a key component to the success of UX projects. They can provide you with information about the project and ensure that you don’t do irrelevant work or waste time on a duplicate study.

Internal stakeholders can include subject matter experts (SMEs), industry experts, business analysts (BAs), architects, product managers/owners, and solution consultants. They know how the job gets done and how best to accomplish it. These stakeholders often interact directly with customers and prospects, and they have direct industry experience—sometimes once from the customer’s shoes.

Use a stakeholder register (VPN required) to keep track of your stakeholders. Reach out to them early and keep them in the loop about the progress and results of your research

Recruiting Research Participants

Recruiting the right research participants is the foundation of effective UX research. It’s important that your participants represent real users. For existing users, it’s vital to help make enhancements and fixes. For potential users, it’s critical to scope requirements to help attract net-new customers. You can start with preliminary discussions or interviews with internal stakeholders to understand the product, who the key customers are, what the key customer roles are, and common feedback.

Once you gather the information about your key customers and targeted users, then you can build user personas to understand their expectations, concerns, and motivations.

Follow these recruitment steps:

Map out your plan
- Drill down on eligibility criteria by looking at your user personas. While you need to understand key demographics of the target user group, you don’t need to match every demographic category. Instead, focus on broader characteristics or typical product users.
- Determine how many participants you’ll need to collect significant results. This depends on which research method you use:
  - Quantitative research is statistics focused and requires 20 or more participants.
  - Qualitative research is insights focused and requires 5 to 8 participants.
Screen participants
- Find your target users by using screeners—questions that filter participants.
  - If you’re testing an app, ask: “How often do you use your mobile phone?” If the respondent doesn’t use their phone often, they’re not a great fit.
- Avoid asking leading questions and yes/no questions. These may prompt or encourage respondents to answer in a certain way.
  - Don’t ask: “Do you use apps on your phone?” Respondents might answer in the way they believe will entitle them to participate in the study.
- Involve diverse perspectives in the process to ensure that you create an inclusive, accessible design.
Reach out
- Leverage Infor’s internal resources.
  - Use Employee 360 to identify internal stakeholders at Infor.
  - Use the Customer Collaboration Program to contact current customers.
- Send a recruitment email that outlines your research goals and expectations.
Stay organized
- Use a participant enrollment log to keep track of who you reached out to, who agreed, who declined, and when they’re scheduled to participate.
Follow up
- Always thank your participants for their involvement.
- Share any high-level results and/or next steps after the research is complete. Transparency will help encourage future participation!

Check out these tips for recruiting the right participants.

Resources

UX Research Participant Enrollment Log (Template)

View

Template: Stakeholder Register

VPN Required