3 Simple Ways to Validate Research Participants to Guarantee That They Qualify for Your Studies

When conducting remote research with UserTesting (or doing any research of any kind really), one of the most critical things is making sure that the people you're talking to are who they say they are.

This is super easy with UserTesting and I'm going to tell you 3 simple ways to do validate those participants. 2 ways are in the screening process and the 3rd is at the start of the test plan. Read ahead or just click play on the video above!

1. Weed out cheaters with landmine answers in questions that allow more than one answer. Don't ask people if they want to buy a car. They'll all say yes. Instead, ask them to pick all of the items in a list that they might want to buy in the next 6 months. Make the list 15-20 items long and right in the middle someone put in a fake product or something ridiculous. If they pick the ridiculous option, they clearly aren't reading and should be discarded.
2. Make the participants put skin in the game. Use a screener to let people know that they will need to demonstrate some skill or other experience during the study. Proceeding when they know that they don't qualify risks them embarrassment and/or expulsion from the UserTesting contributor network. This is a strong motivator for most people.
3. Ask an open ended verbal question at the start of your study that gets your participant talking about the experiences or skills that they said they have in the screeners. It is very difficult to convincingly fake an answer like for 30 seconds to a minute. Most bad actors will be very easy to identify. UserTesting also now offers the AI-Driven Task Summary which aggregates and summarizes all of the responses for you, making it very easy to see who is responding to the study.

No matter what research methodology you're using, if you're incentivizing people to participate, more people will try to get in than truly qualify. That's human nature and not individual platform can prevent it. The best thing we can do is use techniques to counter it and hopefully you put these three techniques to good use in your future studies.