Building my UX Portfolio - Where to find Users to Interview?

Question

I have been interested about a career in UX/UI for a long time and even had a chat with some working UX professionals about their jobs previously. It really sounds like the way to go for me.

So recently, I decided to pivot my career from a frontend developer to a UX/UI designer. This is my top goal for 2022!

At the moment, I am building up three UX/UI projects for my portfolio. Specifically, I am in the user research and interview phase. I asked a few friends already for some of these questions, but I realized that I should get a more diverse sample size!

What's a good approach or good place to go to find users to interview for UX/UI projects?

Answer 1

You might try this approach:

1. Understand who your desired users are, based on who is most likely to need, use, and potentially buy your product. What's their demographic info (age, gender, income? Is their family and partnership status important? Do they live in the city, suburbs, rural area?) Creating some personas helps clarify this for your research.

2. Find people who are representative of your target users. Where might you connect with these people if you were hiring them for a job? In organizations, we would use surveys and might have access to recruitment panels. For someone who is just getting started, though, you might lean into your friends, family, and social networks and ask them if they know someone who fits the description of who you're looking for. You might want to keep it a bit high-level, like "I'm looking for working parents under 35 who don't have more than 30 minutes to cook dinner in the evenings." If you can possibly get some kind of incentive like a $5 Starbucks card, that always helps. If you're looking to talk to extremely pressured people, like pharmacists right now, you might have to really lean on personal connections and see if you can do a favor for them later.

3. Recruit more people than you need. You'll get cancellations, ghosting, it all goes with the territory. If it's a personal connection and they feel bad about bailing out, you can ask them if they know someone else you might talk to who is a [parent under 35 who has less than 30 minutes to cook dinner...] and they might make some recommendations.

4. If you can't find your target users from your personal networks, try joining some local UX meetup groups, product networking groups, and reach out to them. Slack has some good channels.

5. If you're just testing the usability of your app during design/development and don't need attitudinal research (like "how much would you pay for this app"), you can broaden your test group. This is where friends and family can help you out. You need not disclose too much detail in your portfolio write-up about how you recruited them. Just make sure they are an adult who would be generally able to use your app.

Answer 2

Read up on UX 101 - books, they cover this topic in-depth, simple ideas range from Craigslist/Facebook promotion to going to communities where your target audience hangs out, developing relationship with some of those people and requesting them to give you honest feedback.

Answer 3

1. Do your research: what is the product > who are the users / potential users. Find the group you can/should do the interview with.
2. Why do you want to interview them > What is the current state and need. There are plenty of other ways to do user interviews. Sometimes we do something called shadowing instead of interviews, sometimes we do an acceptance test, sometimes we involve a so-called sponsor user instead of interviewing plenty of people. And there is the so-called guerilla test (guerilla usability testing). So create a plan, form hypotheses, and find the one which helps you the best in the current situation.
3. The easiest is the 3F method. Friends, Family, Fools. Startups typically use this one for everything. From testing to funding. Ask around who can be your target audience in your family, friends, etc, find Facebook groups, Twitter accounts, and ask there to help. Plenty of people are willing to help if you ask them nicely.