Caring for participants and yourself during user research, Pt4
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 execution
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 4 — care for your participants and audience when you’re communicating results. 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!
Care for your participants and audience when you’re communicating results
You’re making progress in your project and you want to start telling people about what you’re finding. You’ve done the research with people, and you want their stories to come through so your team builds empathy for the problem and people affected by it.
What I haven’t really thought about until quite recently (thanks to Annie Streater for starting a discussion on this on Slack) is that, in doing this, you are asking your audience to put in emotional labour. They also have a positionality to the topic and participants, and their own set of triggers. At the same time, for your presentation to have the most impact, you want to make sure your audience is ready to immerse themselves in this space.
So what can you do at this point to care for your audience and improve your impact at the same time?
- Plan analysis and outputs before you collect data
- Careful content and format in outputs
- Content guidance and warnings in presentations
- Facilitate discussion
- Let participants have a say
Plan analysis and outputs before you collect data
When you’re presenting your results, you want to do right by the people you researched with and make sure there’s a positive impact from the research. Choices you make at the beginning of a project about what data to collect and how you record information may open up or limit your options for how you present at the end. I have found it useful to think through the rough shape of the output I want to deliver when I’m planning a project, so I can make sure I’m collecting what I need to put users’ voices at the centre of my findings.
At the same time I’ve found it helpful to think about the General Data Protection Regulation and the principle of data minimisation. Collecting data I don’t need or won’t use wastes my time and participants’ time, so it’s always best to avoid that if you can!
I’m also thinking about how to make data collection as unobtrusive as possible, so people still feel comfortable talking to me. One thing I’ve picked up from the consent templates I use in my current job (thanks Jo Arthur for setting those up!) is to break out all your different potential data recording options (written notes, audio, software-generated transcript, screen, video) as separate consent elements. That way people can select all the methods that feel right to them, rather than having to agree to a generic “can I record this session to help me take notes”.
Some of the questions I ask myself are:
- Do you want to be able to share verbatim quotes in a report or slide-deck? Have you got the note-taking setup to generate accurate quotes, so you’re not misquoting someone?
- How do you make sure your quotes have the appropriate context and aren’t disembodied (and then open to misinterpretation) during the analysis process?
- What’s the role of video and audio to help you tell the story? And how will participants feel if you’re recording them? You’ll need to collect the right consent to do this too.
Careful content and format in outputs
You’ve collected your data and you’re starting to analyse; time to think about participant care again! You have a duty of care for the people you spoke to: when you hand their stories and ideas over to other people, will they care for those stories in the same way?
- As you summarise your key points, what’s the impact of how you weigh different insights (majority rules, or each individual point has its own merit)? And are you introducing any bias by emphasising specific points at the expense of others? This blog post is a good intro to what you might want to think about, especially in a tech/ product team.
- Are you making your results so ‘human’ that you’re leaving it open for unconscious stereotyping? This blog post about persona spectrums and this post about building better personas both do a good job of explaining how stereotyping can creep into your work.
- What is the life of your output after you’ve finished it? Does it stand on its own if you hand it over to someone else, or do you need to provide instructions and explanations so readers can get inside your head and your insights?
- Think through the various different cognitive biases that affect how people understand information, especially things like confirmation bias, anchoring, framing effects, the law of triviality. See a good guide to 50 top biases in this infographic (thanks Rosa for sharing this with me!)
Content guidance and warnings when presenting
Next I’m going to talk about how content guidance can help you care for your audience when presenting information. This can come in two forms: warning people about potentially sensitive information, and laying the ground for active participation.
The first part should be relatively simple. Content guidance is a good practice in many parts of society now — especially TV and social networks — to warn people about potentially sensitive subjects before they arise. If you think you may trigger a negative emotional reaction in your audience (especially memories of trauma), you need to warn them first so they can opt-out or prepare themselves for the information they’re about to hear. There’s a good introduction to using them in science writing here.
The second part is an extension of that. You’re presenting your results to try and build empathy; you’re asking your audience to put in emotional work. You’re probably also presenting to help a team make a decision. In both cases, you’re looking for active participation; it’s not just a report to read, or a presentation to listen to, but a process the audience is part of. This mirrors one of the points I made in post 1: if co-design showed me that I am my research, it also showed me that my audience is my research too.
Think about this quote about the power of recordings when presenting findings from user testing.
“when I include a video of someone saying, “I had a terrible experience and I am never going to buy this again!” that is a mic drop moment. Stakeholders usually perk right up and ask, “OK, what do we need to do to make sure that doesn’t happen again?” Our teams really care and value how to ensure we’re providing the best user experience possible.” from the people nerds blog
The language of this quote is so interesting, especially “perking right up”, “our teams really care”. I think it conveys every researchers’ hope about the impact of your findings. But as with content guidance for sensitive topics, is it a responsible use of your power to setup a sudden and surprising mic drop moment, with potentially unexpected emotional reactions? I’ve been thinking about how to ensure my audience is in the right frame of mind for safer emotional activation. I’m trying out these thee things so far:
- add some text in reports or presentations to set peoples’ expectations of the emotional labour I’m asking for
- add opening and closing activities (following the idea of check-ins and check-outs I introduced in Part 3) to get people into the right space
- facilitating discussions more carefully (which I talk about more in my next section)
All of this is made much easier if the audience is known to you. I like User Manuals as a method for getting to know a team and each individuals’ work preferences (thanks Lab team for showing me the way!). If I’ve done these exercises, I try to revisit them at the point of presentation preparation to make sure I’m being considerate of my colleagues’ needs and preferences.
Facilitating careful discussion
You’ve made the presentation, all your insights are out there, and then there’s the classic final slide: “any questions”… What I’ve realised over the last few years from learning about Liberating Structures (thanks Leanne and all for telling me about this!) is that this isn’t the most caring way to promote discussion and ideation. I’m a big fan of the ideas behind 1–2–4-all: quiet individual consideration, and then building and refining ideas together for sharing with a group. So now when I’m looking to start a discussion, I’m thinking about things like:
- Am I offering a specific question for people to respond to?
- Am I offering everyone an equal chance to solidify their own thoughts before someone jumps in?
- How do I avoid ‘HIPPOs’ hogging the limelight? (see more about how HIPPOS affect team decision-making)
- How do I collect as many thoughts as possible and store them for posterity?
- How can I help people build their idea through peer discussion?
One way I’ve made this work (thanks for showing me this technique Lyndsey and Clare) if I’m making a slideshow presentation is to have several slides (one per question) and some blank text boxes to allow people to get their thoughts out. It’s a low-tech version of a virtual whiteboard; so you can always use that if you’re on mural or miro or jamboard etc. Once people have had their individual thinking time, use breakout rooms to facilitate peer discussion. Because you can see all the ideas out there, and discuss them in pairs and groups, I’ve found this approach helps the exchange of knowledge and experience; which helps strong, well rounded ideas to form.
Let participants have a say
The last, but by no means least, act of care is about your original research participants. In a classic research project, your end-user is your senior stakeholder or team members, to make a decision: once they’ve seen it and made a decision, that’s your job done.
This kind of model is a huge power exercise. It assumes that it’s your team and decision-makers who have the expertise and that your research participants have nothing more to give once you’ve collected their story. I make a similar point in Part 1 of this series.
Co-design challenges us to break out of a narrow definition of expertise (it’s the job of a product team to decide what we build for people) and to share your power with the people using a product or service. There’s a number of reasons why this produces more caring and impactful research:
- Makes you more accountable to your users: the core principle of ‘user-centred design’ is to put users in the middle of every decision. Sharing findings and asking their opinion is another way of building a service or product around people, rather than for/ without them.
- Increase accuracy: when you let people see what you heard from them and give them a chance to clarify or add to what they think, you’re less likely to mis-represent their views
- Missing useful insight: once people see their own story together with others’, it may open new perspectives and ideas which you can use to improve your product or service (similar to the point I make above about facilitating careful discussion)
- Increases chances they’ll help you again: especially if your participants are motivated by gratitude and thanks (as alluded to in this blog post by People Nerds), this is a great way to show your gratitude and thanks back. Hopefully it propels a virtuous cycle of feedback and participation. My former colleague Faiza talks about this in her recent blog post on this.
I’ve started doing this in my last few projects: mostly asynchronously, asking for feedback from individuals. The first few times I didn’t get many responses, so I’ve started introducing it earlier in the process: in invites and at the end of my discussions. This has led to a little more feedback; and that feedback has helped us shape our design work. I’m hoping to do something more like Collaborative Sensemaking (following this example of that here) in the future if participant time and our budget allows. Let me know if you’ve got any other tips or techniques that can help close the loop!
What now?
Having thought through all this, there’s probably a number of different things you might do next. Some of this is about research planning and making sure you’re doing everything you can during the project to make it easy to take care when you’re presenting data. Some of it is about how you create space around your presentation to care for your audience and for your data.
In the past it’s that last bit I’ve found hardest to do. Sometimes that’s because presentations are often spaces I have the least control over. Things like sprint reviews or a show and tell are owned by and facilitated by a delivery manager or a product manager; you need to work closely with them to make sure they can support you to do this. Other times it’s because of tight timelines and lack of availability, and I’ve had to compromise on some things in order to fit the needs of the team. It’s not something I’ve perfected yet but I’m working on it!
And finally…
Well that’s it from me for now. That’s my reflection on how a bunch of different ways of working have influenced the way I do user research. It’s been so nice to go back and reflect on all the sources of inspiration I’ve encountered over the last few years, and I hope you’ve enjoyed the ride with me!
One final shoutout to Abbie Foxton and Clare Villalba for reading an early draft (when it was just 1 post instead of a series!) and giving me really useful comments; I couldn’t have done this without you!
As I said in the introduction, this started as an exercise for myself to reflect on where all the pieces fit together into one whole, and I wanted to share this publicly to help others if they wanted to learn more. I’m sure I’ve missed something; let me know in the comments — I’d be glad to hear it!
If you’ve missed any of the other parts of this series, you can find them here:
- Part 1: Assess power and incentives using a co-production framework
- Part 2: Identify positionality and triggers using the wheel of power and privilege
- Part 3: Put participant and collaborator care at the core of your method execution
