UX Research With Real Participants
We recruit people who match your audience, give them realistic tasks on your site and record where they hesitate, misread or give up. You get the evidence and a clear explanation of the causes.
Short answer
A UX research project puts five to eight people from your audience in front of your site, one at a time, with realistic tasks. You receive a research plan, a screener, a session guide, notes and clips from every session, and a findings report that ranks problems by severity.
On this page
When research with participants is the right choice
Research with participants answers the question that analytics and expert reviews cannot: why. If the team keeps debating the cause of a drop-off, if your audience has specialist knowledge that an outside expert lacks, or if you are about to spend real money on a redesign, watching people use the site is the most direct way to settle the matter.
It is also the right choice when you want to compare two directions before building one. Testing a prototype and the current site with the same tasks shows which version people find easier and, more usefully, why. That reasoning carries into every later design decision.
It is not always the first step. If the site has never had any kind of review, an expert usability audit can clear away obvious problems more cheaply, so participants spend their time on the issues that are harder to predict.
How a research project runs
1. Research plan
We start by agreeing on what you need to learn. The plan lists the research questions, the audience segments, the tasks, the method, the number of sessions and the schedule. It also states what the study will not answer, so nobody is surprised later.
2. Recruiting
We write a screener that filters for the people who matter to you, such as first-time buyers, current customers or professionals in a particular field. Participants can come from your own customer list or from a recruiting panel. We plan for five to eight sessions per audience segment in one round. Five is the core of the qualitative guidance discussed in our sample size guide; the extra sessions cover no-shows and the natural variety within a segment.
3. Sessions
Sessions are run remotely over video, one participant at a time, with screen sharing. We plan for 45 to 60 minutes each. We give the tasks, ask the participant to think aloud and follow up with neutral questions. If you wish, people from your team can watch live.
4. Analysis and report
After the sessions, we review every recording, log each problem against the task where it happened and group related problems by cause. The report ranks findings by severity and links each one to the evidence.
What you receive
| Deliverable | What it contains | Format |
|---|---|---|
| Research plan | Questions, audience, tasks, method, schedule, limits | Shared document |
| Screener | Qualifying questions and quotas for recruiting | Shared document |
| Session guide | Introduction script, tasks and follow-up prompts | Shared document |
| Session notes | Timestamped observations and quotes for each participant | Spreadsheet |
| Highlight clips | Short recordings of key moments, where consent allows | Video files |
| Findings report | Ranked problems, causes, evidence and recommendations | PDF and editable document |
| Readout | A walkthrough of findings with time for questions | Video call |
What we need from you
We need a contact who can answer questions about the business and approve the plan, access to the site or prototype being tested, and agreement on who will pay participant incentives and how. Incentives are a direct cost of the study. If you pay them yourself, read our guide to consent and participant incentives, which explains the IRS reporting threshold that applies to payments made in 2026 and later.
If participants come from your customer list, we need a way to contact them that respects the permissions they gave you. We will not use personal data for anything beyond scheduling and running the sessions.
Timeline
We plan for three to five weeks for a single round, from approved plan to readout. Recruiting is the step with the most variation, because specialist audiences take longer to find. Testing a prototype rather than a live site adds a short step to check that the prototype supports every task before sessions begin.
Consent and participant care
Every participant receives a plain explanation of the study, how the recording will be used and stored, and their right to stop at any time without losing their incentive. Recording consent is asked for separately from consent to take part. Clips are shared only with the people named in the scope, and raw recordings are deleted on the schedule agreed in the plan.
What research cannot tell you
A round of five to eight sessions is a qualitative study. It is excellent at revealing problems and explaining their causes. It cannot tell you what share of all visitors will hit a problem or predict a percentage change after a fix. When a decision depends on numbers like those, we recommend a quantitative method and say so in the plan.
Questions about research projects
Can our team watch the sessions?
Yes, if you would like to. People from your team can watch with cameras and microphones off and send us questions in a private chat during the session. Participants are told beforehand that others may be watching.
Do you test prototypes or only live sites?
Both. We can test a live site, a staging site or a clickable prototype from a design tool. Prototypes need to support every task in the plan, and we check that before sessions start.
What if our audience is very specialized?
Specialist audiences, such as clinicians, engineers or procurement managers, take longer to recruit and may expect higher incentives. We discuss realistic options during scoping, including recruiting from your own network.
Can you run unmoderated tests instead?
Yes, for simple tasks with a clear end point. Unmoderated tests cost less per session but lose the follow-up questions that explain behavior, so we use them to complement moderated sessions rather than replace them.
Ready to see your site through your visitors' eyes?
Tell us what the site is for and where you think people get stuck. We reply with questions, a proposed method and a written scope.
- No obligation
- Written scope
- Plain-English findings