Weeknote #17 [W26.04] - Recruiting user research participants, involving more people in Cinema Next Door, and a recovering Malcolm
Published on Jan 26, 2026 • 3 min read
Recruiting user research participants for consumer-facing apps is hard
Recruiting participants for a consumer-facing app has turned out to be more difficult than it was for the internal apps that I’ve worked on previously.
I’ve been arranging usability testing sessions for a few weeks now. About half the users who accept invites don’t show up. The ones most likely to turn up are people who’ve had bad experiences with customer support. Those conversations usually go in a completely different direction from the set agenda of the sessions. Not that this feedback isn’t useful. It is. But, sometimes you just want to focus on the thing at hand.
On internal projects, recruiting users was never this hard because we had, in a sense, a captive audience. With a consumer-facing app, users don’t have any real incentive to participate. Most of my users are HR professionals with packed schedules, and giving feedback to us is understandably at the bottom of their list.
The only thing we can offer is an early look at upcoming features. It’s cool, but in practice it doesn’t seem like enough yet to convince people to reliably show up.
Involving more people Cinema Next Door
One of the main ideas behind starting Cinema Next Door was to involve more people in running the thing. Whether that’s curating films or just for hosting events.
I’m not quite satisfied with our progress on that front yet, but.. we made some progress this week.
On Sunday we had our first community pick — Where is the Friend’s House? — hosted by Vishesh. After the screening, we also had a drawing session led by Yukti (yourjournalproject on Instagram).
Next month we’re planning something similar, but for writing instead of drawing, hosted by Mariam.
Malcolm is slowly recovering
Malcolm’s been doing better over the last couple of weeks.
Before he left in December he was around 5.1 kg. When he came back three weeks ago he’d dropped to 4.6 kg. He’s now back to 4.8 kg.
Still not at his old weight, but he looks visibly healthier now than a couple of weeks ago.