Caring for participants and yourself during user research, Pt1
To help me, as a research facilitator, take care of the people I include in research I’ve been applying a few different methods. Until now it’s been little bits of practice here and there. I’ve been reflecting on how to fit them all together in a whole research project, and arrived at four ingredients to add to my research recipe:
1. Assess power and incentives using a co-production framework
2. Identify positionality and triggers using the wheel of power and privilege
3. Put participant and collaborator care at the core of your method
4. Care for your participants and audience when you’re communicating results
In this blog series I’m going to look at each one in turn. This is part 1 — assessing power and incentives using a co-production framework. I’ll link to the rest at the end of this post.
Most of my experience comes from a domestic, UK, charity sector position; I’m sure I’ve missed things, and I’ll be glad to hear from you if you have more links, ideas or suggestions I can use to continue improving my craft!
How is this going to improve my research though?
Why add these ingredients at all? Because in my experience it’s produced a better, more interesting end result. Because giving away some of my power (as a research facilitator) to more voices and points of view in my projects and decisions has helped me see the whole picture of a particular problem. Because putting care at the core of my practice, rather than it being a step in the process, has helped me develop deep, trusting relationships that allow ideas to flourish. I feel like letting groups decide together which part of the problem to solve first has increased the chance of making more useful and usable outputs. And above all, I feel like those ideas and findings have much more weight, knowing they came from a group of collaborators, when you’re presenting to more senior stakeholders.
You might also be interested in reading reports like this one by the National Lottery Community Fund, or this reflection on the pros and cons of co-production in health research.
What is co-design?
This first point owes a lot to the work of Kelly Ann McKercher and their book Beyond Sticky Notes; and to Clare Villalba and Leanne Griffin for introducing this work to me! Also a shoutout to this piece by 2CV on co-designing the future of money advice and support, which was one of the first pieces of research I read where co-design was a core part of the approach.
Remember that co-design is a way of rebalancing who holds power in design projects: sharing the power held in a design team with users.
Co-design is about designing with, not for.
Practically, it is a movement, mindset (read more) and an ever-expanding set of tools.
Co-design is about challenging the imbalance of power held by individuals, who make important decisions about others lives, livelihoods and bodies. Often, with little to no involvement of the people who will be most impacted by those decisions.
When me and my colleagues started trying out co-design, this was a humbling part of the process. There’s four main things I’ve taken away from co-design as an approach into all my research work.
- unlearning critical distance
- you are your research too
- you don’t always have to do more research
- Embedding secondary research to improve the scope of research projects
1 — Unlearning critical distance
A lot of the ideas within co-design went against things I’d read in the beginning of my career around keeping critical distance from what users say, and not always trusting them to know what they wanted: because that was your job to figure out! I feel like the quote (usually attributed to Henry Ford, though it’s unclear if he ever did say it) about people saying they want faster horses is too easily used to minimise voices outside a design team. And this Harvard Business Review article does a good job of unpacking why that kind of mindset can stifle innovation in an organisation.
Embracing co-design showed me that my job as a researcher is to ask the right questions, and help people join into the design process, rather than seeing research as a feeder activity for the exclusive design professionals to use to make things for people.
2 — you are your research too
In a Co-design you cannot be a fly on the wall; you have to show up and take part in building genuine relationships. Because of this, who you are as a researcher and as a human really matters. There is no option for removing researcher subjectivity. Instead we must embrace it.
Through a few co-design projects, I learned the importance of starting a project knowing what power you actually hold as a research facilitator and how you intend to use it. I now think more about:
My influencing power: people are looking to you, so how you present your ideas may have an influence on how they view a problem. I now lay out what I think I might observe before I start a project (a practice I picked up with Izaak Wilson at Citizens Advice) just to reveal to myself what I think I might see. This helps me reflect on how much of myself I’m putting into a project, and how much space I’m giving others to challenge and inspire new ideas in me. This is a variation on the idea of writing hypotheses as part of research planning, which this Invision Blog explains.
How much change an organisation will tolerate: I feel like I used to be a lot more optimistic about research, embracing the rational actor model of “People will listen to facts and follow the insights you present because they’re evidence based”. Of course that doesn’t always work in reality, because organisations have needs too (deadlines, budgets, organisational priorities) which might trump your research. And there’s no worse feeling than spending time on an idea with a bunch of collaborators, only to be told it’s not the right time for this idea. Tools like the ‘iceberg model’ (which I picked up from Maria Portugal) are really useful to think through how much change your organisation might be able to stomach, which can help set boundaries so you produce a good outcome.
3 — You don’t always have to do more research
Don’t get me wrong, I’ve always loved desk research. I like reading about other people’s ideas, thoughts, experiences, and knowledge, and finding ways to inspire my own work. Since trying out co-design I’ve come to see just how important that grounding exercise is for all research.
One of Kelly Ann McKercher’s main questions is “what has been done in this area before?”. It challenges you to deeply understand your topic area and the people you’re working with before starting out on a design process. This was something I instantly clicked with because of my love of reading.
But that feeling grew deeper when I started linking this up with ideas from Trauma-informed design. This video course on Trauma-informed design is a great starting point to that if you’re interested. The principle of not re-traumatising people was the cross-over point for me with the “what’s been done here” question; you can avoid doing unnecessary primary research, care better for your participants, and have more productive discussions with them if you pay attention to your secondary research in the first place.
That secondary research should really be a quality gate for any project before you work out what other methods you might use to discover a problem; because the answer is probably already out there! This becomes even more valuable when you collaborate with a laser-focussed product owner (thanks Rachel, Izaak and Joe for showing me the way!) on this; this kind of information was invaluable in former projects to create a solid scope of work based on what’s known and what isn’t.
4 — Embedding secondary research to improve the scope of research projects
After reading some co-production resources and trying it out myself, I now have questions I ask myself before any research project.
- What power do you/ your team have?
- Am I the right person to lead/ facilitate this work? What other roles do we need for a successful project?
- What has already been done in this area, and with/for/to this group of people?
- What’s the context now and in the coming months? Is this a good time to “co-” with different people?
Kelly Ann McKercher has laid out a longer list of questions in a really useful Miro template
It’s worth also thinking about “what’s in it for people to participate?”. This has two sides.
- what do your participants have to gain? How are you advancing their goals through the act of co-ing or researching with them?
- what do they have to lose, especially if something doesn’t go according to plan? What are you going to do to mitigate that risk? The GDS framework for Threat Modelling might help with this
What next?
I would then use the answers to these questions to decide how to go forward. I’ll think about the makeup of the team, the timeline, who does what and how decisions get made. In a few cases it’s helped me re-position pieces of work to include more “co” elements, but in other cases it’s helped me push back against pressure to “co” without having enough time or resource to do it safely and effectively.
Once you’ve had a look at your project from a co-production perspective, it’s time to move on to step 2: Identify positionality and triggers using the wheel of power and privilege. Click here to read on!
