Note to the reader:
This part of the field guide comes from our 2019 version of the UX Research Field Guide. Updated content for this chapter is coming soon!
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An incentive is a reward that you offer participants in exchange for taking part in your research. Incentives encourage participation, can help you recruit a broader pool of participants, and thank people for their time.
Incentives can be anything—from company swag to cold, hard cash. While cash and cash-like rewards are the most common type of incentive, what you offer should be based on who you’re looking to recruit.
When it comes right down to it, incentives are a tool for attracting quality applicants, getting a large volume of applications, and encouraging people to show up for your study.
What’s more, as 18F, a digital consultancy for the US government explains:
Incentives often result in a more diverse, representative set of participants. Without incentives, you often end up recruiting people with a strong intrinsic interest in your website. These people may not have the same needs and experiences as a less interested pool of users. With incentives, you can encourage less interested, more representative people to participate.
But it’s well worth mentioning that people ought to be compensated simply because their time and their input are valuable. You probably wouldn’t bother inviting them to participate in your research otherwise.
And your time is valuable too! That’s why it’s so important to structure your incentives appropriately so that your participants don't end up leaving you and your team hanging at the last minute.
Some people worry that offering incentives to participate in user research can compromise the results of a study. The argument goes that doing so will:
Laura Klein, user experience expert and author of Build Better Products and UX for Lean Startups (and Awkward Silences guest!), writes:
A lot of people ask whether offering some sort of incentive for people to participate in a study will bias the results. The answer is, "not if done correctly."
And luckily, that’s what this chapter is about—how to create a great incentives plan!
Now that you know your options, let’s go over how to create a plan for user research incentives—including how to calculate the right amount to pay, how to communicate about incentives, and how to distribute them (which you should be prepared to do soon or immediately after each session).
Firstly, know your audience...
Before you can hammer out the specifics of your incentives plan, you need to establish:
We covered the first two items in-depth in the chapter on How to Recruit Participants for User Research Studies, and we went deeper on screener surveys in the last chapter. If you haven’t already, we recommend pausing to read those before finalizing any incentive plans.
As a refresher, to figure out who to recruit for a study, you should think about your research question, imagine the ideal participant who can give you the answers you need, and identify the criteria that must be true about them in order to qualify for your study.
The answers to these questions will help you create a profile of the type of participant you’re looking for—aka the folks you’re trying to attract and motivate with an incentive.
🧠 Learn how to write compelling recruitment emails—with best practices & sample templates to help you boost response rates and recruit faster.
To get really useful results you need to capture the right audience. So how should you incentivize people to participate in your study?
Monetary incentives, including gift cards, are the most popular form of incentive, but incentives can also be:
The most important thing about your incentives is that they are valuable to your participants and that they get people excited about participating in your research.
Cash-based incentives are an understandably popular incentive format from the participant side. Cash is straightforward—it’s easy to pay out, appeals to customers and non-customers, and gives participants the flexibility to spend it however they want.
There are drawbacks to cash incentives, however. For one thing, some participants are not able to accept cash—with government employees, for example, cash might be considered a bribe. Other participants—such as very high-income earners, current customers, or B2B prospects—might not be as motivated by cash as they would be by account credits, swag, or other types of incentives.
Cash-based incentives can also come with tax implications, depending on how much you’re paying and where both parties are located.
We recommend researchers use digital payment platforms like PayPal for cash-based incentives (rather than, you know, sending participants a stack of $20s). If you use User Interviews for recruiting participants for a study, you can choose to have us instantly process incentive payments through gift cards—we’ll also automatically issue 1099s for your tax records.
Use cash-based incentives when you:
Consider different methods if you:
Gift cards are cash equivalents, redeemable at particular retailers and websites. They’re another popular incentive format.
They appeal to both customers and non-customers, may be permissible in cases where people can’t accept cash, and—while they don’t offer participants the same flexibility on where to spend them—still give participants a degree of control over how to redeem their reward. And sometimes gift cards can be more appealing to high income earners than straight up cash.
But there are drawbacks here as well. If you’re recruiting from an international audience, bear in mind that the value of gift cards often doesn’t translate from country to country— participants in San Francisco are unlikely to appreciate a €50 gift card to Dutch supermarket chain Albert Heijn, just as users in the Netherlands would find your generous offer of a $300 Applebee’s gift card rather worthless.
In fact, many gift cards simply won’t appeal to some people at all, which is why we recommend offering participants the ability to choose their own gift card from a list of popular retailers. Incentives are always more valuable when they’re relevant to the recipient.
Another thing to consider is that many of the same bribery and ethical rules about not accepting cash incentives will apply to gift cards as well. And as cash-equivalents, gift cards can have the same tax implications as cash.
Use gift cards incentives when you:
Consider different methods if you:
Product discounts or account credits can often trump cash-based incentives when it comes to recruiting current customers.
If you’re recruiting consumers, this can be as straightforward as a coupon code for future purchases, or a reduced subscription price for services.
With B2B research, you’ll want to consider whether the people you’re hoping to talk to are your users (people who actually use your product day to day) or the people in charge of making purchasing decisions or both.
If your users aren’t the same people involved in purchasing decisions for their team, they may be less motivated by account credits (they won’t personally see the reward—their company will). In this case, other types of incentives may be more motivating. But account credits can be a great way to appeal to B2B customers higher up the ladder.
One benefit of using discounts and credits to incentivize participation in research is that it costs nothing upfront and there’s much less administrative overhead—you don’t have to worry about distributing cash or gift cards to individuals. It can also be a great way to encourage ongoing customer engagement with research.
But of course, this strategy is much less appealing to non-customers—and unhappy customers, too, for that matter.
Offer account credits or product discounts when you:
Consider different methods if you:
Don’t underestimate the power of good swag. There is, after all, a whole community of people dedicated to buying, selling, and trading Mailchimp monkeys. (Related side note: Do any other New England kids remember Dunkin Donuts’ Coolatta bears? Oh, to be a child in 2000...).
Swag—branded products that you give away for free—can be a great way to motivate die-hard fans and current customers. And if you already have swag on hand (hint: ask your marketing team), there’s minimal (new) cost to this strategy. Plus, it’s free advertising for your company.
However, like account credits and discounts, swag won’t appeal to everyone. Non-customers are less likely to be motivated by branded products, and no matter how cool your T-shirts are, they won’t pay the bills.
Offer account credits or product discounts when you:
Consider different methods if you:
If none of the common incentive types outlined above feel like the right fit for your ideal participant profile, it may be time to get creative.
Here are a few alternative incentive formats to consider:
Incentives are best when they’re tailored to the task you’re requesting your participants to complete, the time commitment involved, and how (in)convenient it is for users to participate.
Some studies require more effort, time, and thought than others. For example, if you’re conducting a quick, unmoderated usability test, a lower incentive is probably enough to compensate your participants. On the other hand, if you’re conducting a weeks-long diary study that requires multiple interviews and diary entries, prepare to spend more on your incentives.
As a rule, moderated user research studies warrant a higher incentive than unmoderated studies. That’s because unmoderated research can often be completed on the participant’s own time, while moderated research takes place at a specific time and requires more coordination and communication between the researcher and participants.
Essentially, the longer it takes participants to complete a study, the higher their compensation should be. Ditto goes for effort—if participants have to commute to an in-person study, download new software, or make significant adjustments to their schedules, that effort should be reflected in the incentive amount.
We also recommend participants be paid different amounts based on their expertise. For example, if you need to talk to people about their grocery shopping preferences, you don’t need to recruit participants with any kind of specialized experience. You just need general consumers who buy groceries.
But if you need to do research on the usability of a new EEG technology, you need to talk to neuroscientists with specialized training. Because you’re drawing on this very niche skill, you’ll have to pay more in incentives to make it worth your participant’s time.
In our experience—and based on the number crunching we did to create our UX Research Incentive Calculator—we’ve found that the most successful researchers are the ones who pay the best incentive they can reasonably afford.
But if you’re looking for a quick-and-dirty answer:
That’s a threshold, after which you may need to adjust your incentive amount based on things like how tricky it is to recruit your specific participants, how meaningful cash or cash-like incentives are to them, the nature of your study, and so on.
For more detailed guidelines, see the quick reference guide below or use the UX Research Incentive Calculator to get personalized recommendations based on your study’s unique criteria.
Use this quick reference guide to plan your incentives depending on the type, length, and audience for your study. But remember: Our recommendations aren’t hard-and-fast rules. They’re meant to be starting points for a larger conversation about what incentive you should offer to get the best results from your research.
For studies that require specific behaviors or demographics but do not require expertise in specific industries:
For studies that require experts in specific fields or with specific job titles.
To really dig into the weeds of this topic, check out our report, The Ultimate Guide to User Research Incentives, compiled from data from over 25,000 completed research sessions.
Incentives should be distributed as soon as possible after each session. In fact, part of the appeal of digital gift cards and cash-based incentives is that it’s possible to send them to participants within seconds of wrapping up a session.
For longer projects like diary studies, compensation can be broken up and distributed at different times throughout the study to keep participant motivation high over a longer period of time.
Details of how and when you’ll distribute incentives should be clearly communicated in the study description and in emails to participants before and after the session.
To make sure the promised payout goes off without a hitch, you’ll need a plan for distributing incentives in a timely manner. This means collecting the information you’ll need ahead of time—email, address (if sending swag), etc—and keeping track of who has received what (and how much).
Or, if you’re using User Interviews and you choose to distribute incentives as gift cards, you can opt to have us handle distribution for you. Easy peasy.
Paying your participants appropriately is important, but a little kindness and hospitality can go a long way too.
Treat each participant like an important guest, rather than an anonymous test subject. Always emphasize the value of their contributions, and thank them sincerely before and after the study.
And do sweat the details. Make sure participants are aware of what’s required of them before the study, including any deal breakers such as an NDA. Be clear and professional in all of your communications, ask for consent before recording audio or video, and let people know they can take a break or leave if necessary.
Part of being an effective researcher is showing participants their input has value. Payment is one way of doing that, but don’t discount the impact of a good old fashioned ‘thank you’ as well.
