Where Did Everyone Go? How to Improve Your Research Show Rate

About the contributor: Crystal Kubitsky is a seasoned research and design leader who loves helping people conduct better research and make better decisions through process, frameworks, and experimentation. She has over 20 years of experience in research at a variety of organizations, including Comcast, Morgan Lewis, Mayo Clinic, Vanguard, and MongoDB. She’s currently the Sr Research Operations Consultant at Rally, working directly with our customers to help them get the most out of their research operations practices.

Researchers everywhere are asking the same frustrated question: “Why does my show rate keep dropping -- even when I’m offering great incentives?”

Techniques that used to guarantee participant turnout no longer seem effective. Studies that used to take days to complete now require weeks or, worse, never generate enough participation to capture significant results. UX researchers end up frustrated, along with the stakeholders they're trying to help.

It’s easy to chalk up the dropping show rates to “ghosting,” but that framing misses the point. Most participants aren’t deliberately disappearing. They are juggling real constraints and making tradeoffs that affect their ability to join a session. Participation is rarely a simple calendar commitment. It is shaped by competing priorities, shifting circumstances, diminishing value, and the level of trust they feel with the outreach in front of them.

Fortunately, much of this drop-off is preventable. Below, Crystal shares her expert insights on improving show rates. By designing the experience around participants’ real lives, teams can reduce no-shows and build long-term relationships, without resorting to pressure or increasingly expensive incentive strategies.

Here’s how:

Humans First, Everything Else Second

People show up when the experience feels meaningful, not transactional. 

Participants want to understand:

💬 Why their voice matters

💡 Who their insights help

🙌 How their lived experience contributes to better, fairer, more inclusive products

Feeling like you've made the world a better place -- even if only for users of your product -- still means more to most people than a Starbucks gift card. Explain exactly how participants' contributions will shape decisions. Acknowledge their expertise or unique perspective, not just their availability, during both the outreach and the interview process. If participants feel like they matter to you, your study will matter to them.

This connection shouldn't end when the interview is over. Where appropriate, follow up with the changes that were informed by their feedback. Even these small gestures of transparency significantly increase repeat participation.

People who feel seen, respected, and valued will rarely ghost you. 

Trust is the Most Powerful Incentive

Meaning drives participation, but meaning only works when people trust who it’s coming from.

Put simply: you can't buy trust. Before participants care about compensation or committing to an interview schedule, they need to believe your company (and your team) is legitimate, safe, and respectful of their time. That has to be earned.

Trust starts with transparency

Very few people these days trust a random Gmail address or an unknown phone number.

If you want participants to show up, you need to make it easier to believe you are who you claim to be. Use branded email domains, professional templates, recognizable signatures, and consistent outreach patterns. Do all the extra work a scammer wouldn't; this will attract real participants, not ghosters or scammers.

Trust also goes beyond you and your company; it extends to your study and its goals. Provide a public-facing verification page that confirms your research efforts. When you use unbranded channels like SMS, link to this page so participants can independently validate your outreach.

Trust ends with honesty

If you want clear answers from your participants, you have to start by giving them clear expectations. That means, without any marketing-speak or technical jargon, telling each of them:

📞 This is not a sales call

🔒 Their information will remain private

✋ Their participation is voluntary

💜 Their expertise is valued and respected

Trust unlocks participation. Without it, no incentive is compelling enough to make most people show up.

Use Compensation That Builds Confidence

Trust is the most important thing, but incentives do matter -- if participants believe them. Incentives serve as signals of credibility as much as motivators to participate. That means you have to choose the right ones.

Money talks, BS walks

You can't get cute with your compensation if you want to protect the trust you built during outreach. When incentives feel niche, restrictive, or delayed, participants often read them as gimmicks. A clear hierarchy of best practice for monetary compensation makes the experience predictable and respectful for the people you want to engage:

• Cash first
• Prepaid Visa second
• Specific gift cards third

Give Value, Get Engagement

Some participants respond more strongly to nonmonetary incentives. Cash can pull in mercenaries, which can help round out a cohort, but they should never represent the whole or the majority of your pool. Nonmonetary incentives tend to attract your true fans. They balance out the people who are only showing up for a payout.

Examples of effective compensation other than cash include:

• Useful or branded merch
• Charitable donations in their name
• Early access to features or releases
• Influence through direct visibility into product decisions
• Invite-only participation in advisory councils or events
• Public recognition, when ethical and appropriate

Regardless of the compensation you choose, fast, predictable delivery is non-negotiable. The quickest way to build long-term trust is to reward participants promptly, every time.

The Medium is Part of the Message

Email is the most common method, but it is also the easiest to lose, filter out, or ignore, especially for shift workers, gig workers, caregivers, and people with limited internet connectivity. This assumes it does not get caught in spam filtering in the first place.

SMS reaches participants who rarely check email and can create a faster path to action. The tradeoff is trust. Unexpected texts from unfamiliar numbers raise suspicion. Participants can block unknown senders with a single tap. Counter that concern with verification links, a consistent sender identity, and reinforcement through an additional channel.

In-app and product-based outreach are increasingly effective, particularly when recruiting your own users. These channels reach participants when their context is fresh. They also carry a higher trust signal because the communication originates from an environment the user already recognizes. Well-timed in-product prompts, notifications, or post-task invitations can surface opportunities at the moment when participants feel most connected to the experience you want to understand.

No single channel works for every audience. A resilient strategy uses multiple touchpoints, each reinforcing credibility and clarity. When participants see consistent, trustworthy outreach in the places they already communicate or engage, they are far more likely to show up. 

No Schedule Survives Contact with Reality

🔥 Hot Take: Researchers should expect participants' plans to change -- especially for the busiest respondents that you want to reach the most. That means your scheduling system must be easy, and your reschedule options even easier.

Every reminder and confirmation message is another opportunity for participants to re-evaluate whether the session is worth their time. Use these touchpoints to remind them why their perspective matters and what they can expect when they join. This reinforces value at the exact moment when competing priorities might pull them away.

Every reminder and confirmation message should include: 

• A clear reschedule link
• Flexible time options
• Why we want them to attend
• Why their participation is valuable
• What to expect when they do

Clarity prevents confusion, but flexibility prevents no-shows. When you make it easy to adjust plans and keep the value front and center, participation becomes a commitment rather than a gamble.

Meet Participants Where They Are

Participants’ lives are unpredictable. Your research process should account for that by giving them plenty of different methods and opportunities for joining a study.

Make Timing Work for Real Life

Sessions booked far in advance are exponentially more likely to be missed. Try keeping invitations and session windows within 7–10 days of contact, and offering same-day participation whenever possible. Strike while the iron is hot.

Provide phone-only options

Video calls have liberated researchers and participants from the constraints of in-person interviews, but not everyone has the bandwidth, privacy, or device support required for video conferencing. Good old-fashioned phone interviews dramatically increase accessibility.

Start and end sessions on time

Few things erode trust faster than running over. Respect participants’ time as fiercely as you respect your team’s. You can always ask them if they would be interested in a follow-up conversation to share more insights.

Flexibility transforms participation from a burden into a possibility.

Bringing It All Together

Improving show rates isn’t about sending more reminders or offering bigger incentives. It’s about building a participant experience grounded in trust, relevance, clarity, flexibility, and meaning.

"When participants understand your intentions, see the value of their contribution, and feel the process accommodates their lives, not the other way around, participation becomes a partnership, not a transaction." – Crystal

🌟TL;DR the Golden Rule matters in UX research as much if not more than anywhere else; treat your research participants the way you would like to be treated, and your show rates will reflect that effort.

Ready to Build a More Reliable, Participant-First Research Practice?

Download our free ebook: The Definitive Guide to Participant Management, which includes expert insights on increasing show rates and participant engagement from Crystal and other UX leaders from Gusto, Doximity, and GitLab.

Or skip directly to test-driving the UX research tool that helps maximize show rates by automating all the best practices we outlined above: Schedule your personalized Rally demo today.