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Leveraging Craigslist for UX Research

As surprising as it is, Craigslist can be a lean and effective tool for rapidly recruiting thousands of research participants on the cheap…

Jeremy Abrams
UX Collective
6 min readJul 28, 2021
A screenshot of Craigslist.org

If you’re like most user experience researchers I know, recruiting reliable participants for a study can be pricey and time-consuming. Depending on your circumstances, it might even be difficult to get the budget needed to leverage professional recruiting tools like UserTesting.com or UserZoom.

Well, as surprising as it is, Craigslist can be an affordable and effective alternative for those who have a more modest budget. It can be so effective, in fact, that Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky called it out in their book, Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days.

Most of the time, to recruit people who exactly match our target customer, we use Craigslist. We know it sounds crazy, but it works.

Sprint book, Page 119

With that said, if not done carefully, you can collect misleading results and waste resources. To get 100% pure, uncut user data, you should follow these simple steps:

  1. Identify an

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Published in UX Collective

We believe designers are thinkers as much as they are makers. Curated stories on UX, Visual & Product Design. https://linktr.ee/uxc

Written by Jeremy Abrams

Fullstack designer with a background in HCD, research, and development. In a prior life, I acquired a JD and was admitted to the IL state bar in 2014.

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