Caring for participants and yourself during user research, Pt3
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 your 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 3 — putting participant and collaborator care at the core of your method. 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!
Put participant and collaborator care at the core of your method
This post weaves together different blog posts I’ve read about participant care and self-care when you’re actually doing your research. It also adds in some of the techniques I’ve learned from co-design that I want to use in research. At the core is the basic introduction I got at a workshop run by ResearchU about researching on sensitive topics.
Here’s my synthesis of key points to consider:
- Full prior and informed consent
- Make people comfortable in the research space
- Set boundaries in introductions
- Plan escape routes for both parties
- Check-ins and check-outs
Full prior and informed consent.
People need to know exactly what they’re signing up for and what you will do with their data before you start collecting any data. I first came across the ideas around Free Prior and Informed Consent at university. It was part of research ethics theory, but the practice of it was often more geared towards risk mitigation than participant care.
I got a little bit more exposure to this in practice in my first job out of uni. Working with United Nations Conventions meant research was often international and multi-cultural, and Free Prior and Informed Consent was seen as a good foundation to build your research from. See for example this framework from the Food and Agricultural Organisation. I’m really grateful to my colleagues at WCMC for this early exposure to good research practice!
One thing I do in every project is remind myself that the participant is a more important user of the consent statement than I am. Sure you’re carrying some legal risk (you need to prove you have permission to collect the data), but they’re handing over their precious data to you! And that means, you need to collect consent in the way that’s most appropriate for them. In my time at Citizens Advice especially, I learned to be a bit more flexible; just because the legal default is documents, that doesn’t mean you always have to do that. Especially if you’re doing a phone or video call, or something in person, can you take that chance to explain consent and collect verbal consent? David Travis writes about this about ⅔ of the way into this blog post.
And it’s also worth thinking about who else might need to be in the ‘room’ when they’re giving consent. Following your power and privilege exercises (see post 2 of this series), do you think your participants might want to invite along a friend or family member to reassure them or help them understand the process? This is something we did a couple of times with research at Citizens Advice.
Since then we’ve had the General Data Protection Regulation, which came with it a wave of new legalese and rights. Content designers are your friends here: they can help decrypt the jargon and inform people about their rights and what we want their help with (thanks Tom and all for reviewing my work!). Even just the act of explaining to a colleague what you’re doing, in as simple language as possible, can help your statement become much more user friendly.
For a bit more on this topic I thought this “Anatomy of a user research consent statement” was a good read (it’s another David Travis link sorry!)
Make people comfortable in the research space.
Whenever you’re doing research, you want people to feel comfortable. Fundamentally this is an ethical thing to do; you should do no harm during your research. But it’s also to improve your data quality. The more comfortable and open the participant feels, the more likely they are to participate fully and deeply in the discussion. The same goes for you too: the more comfortable you feel, the smoother everything will flow and the better your research will be.
Some good practices I’ve picked up include:
- Start by thinking about the self, the environment, and the facilitation relationship, as outlined in this video about trauma-informed design. Watch from 22 minutes in for the tips on creating safety, or slide 17 in the slide-deck that goes with the video.
- Ask multiple times about any accessibility needs. Asking this question in the context of the research session you’re inviting them to, rather than a generic ‘access needs’ question on a screening survey, might make the participant more comfortable to respond. It also gives them a more discrete context to answer appropriately, and gives you more actionable information to ensure they can participate effectively.
- Think through how friendly, open and chatty you want to be. As I introduced in post 1 of this series, ‘you are your research’. What can you say and do to build rapport, without taking up too much space or opening up parts of yourself that might cause you or the participant distress? This recent article on build rapport was a useful summary of good practice.
- If you’re doing remote research, offer multiple options for the participant to interact with you, and position each option as equal. Scheduling calls on Zoom with a specific length at a specific time with call log-ins etc are great, but that can also be intimidating. “Call me anytime after 3pm, here’s my landline number” might work well for other people too. But if you don’t present those as equal options, the phone call option will be seen as ‘lesser’. And even if it’s preferred, it’s harder psychologically to select because it’s the ‘alternative’. This is the anchoring heuristic.
- Think about your posture and keep regular (but not continuous) eye contact if you’re on video. This is all about positive body language: looking interested, open and enthusiastic. It helps build trust and empathy. Similarly I often get note-takers to turn video off to not distract the person talking. This is a good article with some more body language tips.
- Finally, there’s something we can learn from the education space here too. This guide on looking after wellbeing when teaching racial justice has two good tips to add here:
- Prepare clear and non-punitive responses
- Have a reporting procedure/ safeguarding
Set boundaries in introductions.
Your introduction is important to set out what’s in and out of scope for the discussion. While you want to give your participant as much room as possible to take the conversation where they want (especially if you’re on the more open, discovery end of the research spectrum), it’s good to give people focus and boundaries. This is about respecting and caring for the time they’re giving you, as well as ensuring you have a productive conversation.
For example, if you are talking about someone’s experience with a specific part of a website:
- Open by confirming the part of the website or service you’re talking about; visual cues can be useful here to help re-confirm you’re talking about the same thing
- Also say what you aren’t going to talk about. So if it’s just focussed on navigating a website, and not what comes next, then say that
- Mention that you might stop them if you think we’re going off track; frame it as wanting to make best use of the participant’s time
The welcome script that Steve Krug wrote in the book “Rocket Surgery Made Easy” (thanks Simão for introducing this to me!) has been a good base to build from and also emphasises things like:
- “We’re testing the site not you”. This has always been a powerful line to build psychological safety. It puts the responsibility back on you, as a researcher, and your service, product or website, and can allow the participant to open up.
- “Don’t worry about hurting my feelings”. This was always an interesting line to read out. Reminding people that you’re curious, here to learn, and genuinely interested in seeing how to improve can be a big help.
Going beyond this, setting good boundaries can also be a method of self-care. As Janice and Jane talk about in this essay on self-care in User Research, transference and trauma reactions can be occupational risks for researchers. How you set up a discussion can help manage that risk.
Plan escape routes for both parties.
Thinking about how you want to de-escalate conversations or allow for early completion has been invaluable for me, especially when approaching potentially sensitive subjects. As Janice and Jane mention in this post, giving yourself permission to end interviews early is a good step to ensuring self-care; but this can be difficult or awkward if you’re not prepared!
In the past I’ve done practice interviews before going into research, in addition to preparing some prompts in case they’re needed. This has helped make sure our questions are solid, the facilitation techniques bring people back on track and that we’ve thought through how to manage different kinds of response to the questions we ask.
This talk by Portable on considering mental health in research and design also helped me think some of these things through. In that talk they are discussing a workshop context but it could easily be transferred to any other research setting.
The Pineapple idea in this DScout post is an interesting way of approaching this in a survey.
Check-in and check-out.
These are 2 similar but slightly different techniques you can use to help you promote emotional safety throughout a project.
- Check-ins are for beginnings of meetings; what energy levels are people bringing in, are there distractions they want to leave behind before entering your discussion?
- Check-outs are a practice for after sessions; it’s a chance to unpack how you feel and how we think the participant feels. Packing up and resolving issues before we move on.
This outline by Hyper Island is really useful for thinking through good check-ins. I picked this up during my time at Citizens Advice; it’s something I started practising in the Lab team and in my subsequent teams. Thanks all for introducing them to me and helping me refine this practice!
I want to focus in on the check-outs in particular here. For the research team, it’s always good to debrief and not leave any feelings in the research meeting. That could be feelings about what was said, but also feelings about your own performance (especially if you’re your own worst critic!). In the past, I’ve had a ‘buddy’ on call for 30 minutes after an interview; their fresh set of eyes helps to get a different, more balanced perspective on what happened. Having structure to that time is useful to discuss:
- a 10 minute summary of what was learned/ achieved in the research session
- are the notes/ recording ok
- how are you (facilitator, note-taker etc) feeling
- do you have any concerns about the participant?
- feedback on performance
I’d also consider drawing cues from Non-Violent Communication here. In particular, the framework of observations, thoughts/feelings and objectives helps me break apart what really happened from what I think happened. If I am feeling a bit uneasy or unhappy, this framework also helps me think through which of my needs is unmet from what took place. This page on BAYNVC is a good introduction to these concepts.
What next?
I always find this piece of research planning the most difficult and time-consuming bit, and rightly so! Good planning is key to make sure you, your colleagues, and your participants feel comfortable, safe and able to give their best. It’s always better to be pro-active than having to react quickly if an issue comes up.
This might be the point where you think about additional resource on your team. Do you have a delivery manager or a colleague trained in mental health first aid, who can come in and focus on you and your participants’ safety without being too hung up on ‘the research’ or ‘the output’? If you’re in a large User Research team, can you support each other through each piece of work?
Looking back on this post as well, I’ll admit there’s a lot of little details to work through for each project. But it’s a set of practices that I’ve built up and refined over time by trying to add small improvements to every project adding a new part into the mix. The best place to start is just to start!
There’s one final piece of the puzzle left, and that’s how you take care of your audience and your participants when you present your findings. More on that in Part 4, which you can read here.
