A simple solution for the user recruitment problem in UX research
Recruiting users for UX research studies is perhaps one of the most challenging problems in B2B environments. In this case study I am sharing the approach and the very simple solution that my team came up with to solve this problem.
To comply with my non-disclosure agreement, I have omitted and altered confidential information in this case study. This article is part of my experience working at Glovo and does not reflect the views of the company.
Context 🏪
Working as one of the UX researchers in the design team in charge of the user experience of Glovo’s partners (the stores that sell the products that the rider brings to the customer’s home), one of the most challenging tasks we have during the process is users’ recruitment. In a previous article I mentioned that one of the reasons for this is that partners work in a hectic environment, meaning that they either have a lot of orders to deliver and/or not enough staff to do it, so they do not have time nor the interest to be part of our studies. In these next few lines I will explain the case of a project in which we faced this problem, the very simple solution we came up with to solve it, and the results we obtained from it. Hopefully this will be helpful for other UX researchers facing a similar problem.
Problem 🥺
Glovo’s organizational structure requires that UX researchers must first communicate with Glovo account managers before contacting partners. Account managers are the ones who contact the partners when needed, and it is only through them that my team and I know if the partner is interested in being part of our studies. In addition to this, the rate of opening emails and receiving responses from partners is low and makes the user recruitment process even slower and less efficient.
Our hypothesis 🧐
Constant iterations in product design and rapid development based on user feedback make it essential to have a group of users willing to be part of our studies and collaborate with our team. For this reason, we had to first, make the process of contacting and recruiting users shorter and we needed to make sure that the partner was willing to collaborate with us.
Our hypothesis was that if we could skip the step of relying on Glovo’s agents and contact our users directly, we would immediately make the process shorter.
Type of user 👥
The project we were working on was focused on improving the experience of a particular profile in our partners’ environment: the store manager. Managers and Operators are different profile users: Operators are normally at the store working on getting the orders, preparing them and delivering them to the rider, while Store managers have tasks such as managing the store menus and schedules, accounting, and reviewing invoices, to name a few. From the data we gathered from previous studies, we knew that managers visited their store management page on the Glovo partner website everyday. With this information, the solution became clear.
Solution 💡
How might we get the store managers to let us know if they want to be part of our research studies? What might we do to convince them? These were the questions we had on the table, which we were able to answer with an idea that came out of a meeting I had with the Product Manager in charge of the project.
The solution, as simple as it may seem, proved to be very effective. We implemented a banner (yes, a banner) at the top of the store management page of Glovo’s partner website offering the manager the great opportunity to be part of our product improvement, and from that banner we took them to a form with only a couple of fields -including the email address- that they had to fill in before sending it to us.
We tried a different approach to the problem: we did not ask our users to be part of our studies, but we offered them the oportunity to do so instead.
The key was to define the message that we wanted to deliver. That message had to be persuasive, and the questions of the form needed to be useful for the study but also very easy for the store managers to complete.
Result 🤩
At this point I have to say that the result far exceeded our expectations: in a period of two weeks we received more than 300 responses and in the total period that the banner was shown to our users (just over a month) we received more than 500 responses in total. What does that mean for the UX research team? It means that we had more than 500 users willing to collaborate with us in our studies, we had their email addresses and we had their approval to be contacted by us. In the projects that followed the implementation of that banner, we were able to shorten the user recruitment process to half the time it took before.
Next steps 🤓
It is clear that having a large number of users willing to be part of our studies does not guarantee the fact that they are “quality users”. For example, we do not know if they will share interesting information, or if they have enough experience to share helpful insights, or if they will reliably respond to each invitation in a timely manner.
All of that “user classification” is part of the next steps in building our user community, as is cataloging the type of store they manage and its size. As a research team, another next step is to expand our borders since the banner was implemented only in one country ;)
Conclusions 👍🏽
After this experience we know that sometimes the problem might come from the structure of the company we work for, that sometimes the simplest solution is the most effective, that users are willing to work with us but sometimes we do not know it, and that providing them with a simple but direct communication channel can be a very effective way to make them part of the community. In fact, the feedback we received from users was that they were grateful to have their opinions and ideas taken into consideration.
If you are interested in knowing more about the challenges we face as a UXR team, you can read these articles:
Challenges & solutions for UX research in a B2B environment — part 1
Challenges & solutions for UX research in a B2B environment — part 2
And last but not least, in case you are interested in being part of the Glovo team, you might consider applying for this UXR position :)
Thanks a lot for reading.
