Hey, there. At this point, you should have a firm understanding of what it means to empathize with users. To really understand how users think and feel, you need to talk to them directly. One way you can learn from real people about their needs is by conducting interviews. But how can you find and recruit people to interview? In the next few videos, we'll go over what you need to do to recruit participants, prepare for interviews, and conduct interviews. Are you ready? Let's get started with how to recruit participants first. As you can probably imagine, recruiting participants who are available to be interviewed takes time and planning. When you're on the job in the real world, you might start with a screener survey to help identify the best candidates to interview for your research study. A screener survey or simply screener, for short, is a detailed list of questions that helps researchers determine if potential participants meet the requirements of the research study. For the purposes of this course, you aren't required to create a screener, but it is a good tool to be familiar with for the future. Whether you use a screener survey or just move straight to recruiting, you should start with one important step; determine the interview goals. To determine the goals of the interview, ask yourself questions like the following; what do you want to learn from the interviews? Are there certain user problems or pain points that you need to empathize with? Are there any characteristics of users you want to interview? Why? How much information should we have to ensure we get a comprehensive and balanced set of data? Write a clear list of goals to explain why you are conducting interviews which will help determine the characteristics of participants who will be ideal for you to meet with. For example, imagine you're designing a weather app for the project in this course. The goal of your interviews during the empathize phase could be to understand emotions that people experience related to unpredictable weather, or imagine you're designing a shopping app. During interviews, you may want to identify common user behaviors and experiences involved in shopping online, like adding and removing items from a cart. As you start recruiting, aim to form a representative sample. A representative sample is a subset of the target population that seeks to accurately reflect the characteristics of the larger group. The participants in a representative sample should include user groups that have been commonly under-represented in previous research. This lack of representation is often the result of biases due to age, race, gender or ability. Having a diverse pool of participants to choose from will help you create great experiences for all users. Once you've determined the goals of your interviews, it's time to continue the recruitment process. To do this, we'll explore how to search for potential interview participants. In the real-world, there are lots of factors that determine how and where you [inaudible] find potential interview participants. For example, finding people to interview can depend on the company you work for, the type of product you're designing, time constraints for the projects, the projects budgets, and the accessibility of the people you want to interview. For the purpose of this course, you may be limited on who you can find to be part of your study. All of the methods we're going to discuss may not be an option for you at the moment, that's okay. To begin your search, start by creating a list of who you know personally. You can also ask people from your professional circles such as your current or former colleagues, managers or even peers in this course. Once you've compiled a list of people you know, move on to people you don't know. Perhaps the easiest way to recruit interview participants outside of your immediate network, is through social networks or online platforms. We already mentioned finding people to interview through your social media profiles. You can also connect with potential interviewees via professional networking sites like LinkedIn. Online groups based on personal interests are another great resource. For example, if you're designing an app for musicians, you might find an online group about creating music through a Google search or on social media sites like Facebook or Reddit. So you have quite a few ideas for how to find people to interview for your project in this course. I also want to share a couple of ways that you might find interview participants in the real-world on the job. Keep in mind though that these two methods are not expected for the purposes of this course. One method you might use is a third party research recruiting agency. This means that the agency you hire finds people for you to interview. Recruiting agencies are useful because they save you time and can often reach a greater diversity of users than you might be capable of reaching on your own. However, please note, for this course, you are not expected to hire a third party recruiting agency. Hiring a recruiting agency costs money so you will likely only use this method if you're working on a project that has a budget for this service. You and your team may also choose to connect with research participants through paid services like usertesting.com or userinterviews.com. Hopefully, you now have a decently sized list of people you can ask to participate in your interviews. You may decide to reach out to these participants based on who's available. Or if you are sending a screener survey, you might select the candidates who align best with your interview goals. Either way, it's likely that a few candidates will stand out quickly as ideal candidates. When you are ready, reach out to each perspective participant. The most common way to do this is via email. Let's explore what you should include. Start with a greeting that introduces yourself and the project, then briefly explain why you are reaching out to them. Include logistics for the interview like location, date, and time. Next, explain the setup for the interview. This is a good time to explain any parts of the interview that you'll need their consent for like recording audio or video. Begin wrapping up your email by letting the participant know how they should confirm their interview time if they are interested. This can either be through a link to schedule their interview or through an email reply. If you have the budget, add an incentive like a gift card. This always helps sweeten the deal and makes participants excited to interview. Finally, close the email with a salutation and your name. After you confirm people to interview, it's a good idea to send email reminders the week before the interview and the night before the interview. This will help ensure that the people you've found actually show up for their interview, and that's a wrap. Finding great interview participants takes true effort, but the great research you'll conduct will make it all worth it. In the next video, you'll learn all about preparing for interviews. Good luck.
