Getting Started with Inclusive Research
A Beginner’s Guide
Diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives are getting a lot of buzz in the corporate world right now, but not everyone is taking action to make their products inclusive to all. For Auth0, our design team has focused resources on improving the accessibility of our products. My team, the research team, was encouraged by the design team’s efforts.
What started out as an initial dip into the waters of inclusive recruiting became an experience that demonstrated how our research team could grow overall. As the person who spearheaded this project, I struggled at first to find information to move this work forward. I found a handful of Medium articles that shared a lot of general insight, but I was looking for step-by-step guides. I hope this article can serve as a resource for other researchers and operations professionals who want to start the journey to create a more inclusive research practice.
How It Started
I found a few folks who were also interested in accessibility within research by attending UXR Conf in June. I reached out to them on LinkedIn and learned about their experiences.
I had two conversations: one with a former researcher at Thomson Reuters, Divya Pal, and another with an accessibility researcher at ServiceNow, Jaime Young. They both helped me get my bearings and prioritize what I should focus on first. We discussed everything from recruitment tools and training to networking and executive sponsorship.
What I Have Learned So Far
Connect With Others Who Are Doing the Work
My colleague, Divya, worked at Thomson Reuters as a researcher. Reuters is an interesting example. They have a lot of accessibility resources in comparison to most companies. Specifically, they have accessibility specialists for each product team, and those specialists had connections with different nonprofit partners. They were able to leverage these relationships to source participants for research studies.
Networking internally has also been helpful for us at Auth0. I recently connected with Ed Armstrong, a copywriter, who is also interested in accessibility work. He has worked closely with our social impact team for a large nonprofit in the UK, Community Integrative Care. They work with folks with different kinds of accessibility needs and disabilities. Graciously, they want to help us make our product more inclusive. Although we don’t know exactly what this will look like, it is encouraging to have organizations who want to work with us as much as we want to work with them.
Recruitment Tools Can Be Helpful
In the research space there are a myriad of tools that help recruit different audiences for research. Our team’s first inclination was to discover any tools that specialized in recruitment of people with disabilities or accessibility needs.
The only option I found was Fable, a fantastic company that has a several hundred person candidate pool of people with disabilities. My team had considered using the tool, but ultimately it did not work for our needs. Jaime, my colleague from ServiceNow, uses Fable in her practice.
Jaime and I have the same experience of working at companies that primarily have products that are meant for very technical people, and for us at Auth0 that means developers. While ServiceNow does use Fable, they tend to use it for general population research and not for customer research. General population research is often open to anyone, whereas customer research has specific requirements for participants. For Auth0, our requirements often include that participants are developers of a certain amount of experience and technical skill. Therefore, my team opted to not use Fable because we do not have a need for general population research. However, Fable did give us a lot to think on regarding how we would treat folks with disabilities or accessibility needs in our panel.
Fable values their panel participants and pays them a competitive wage. They treat the panel like a community and want participants to feel valued and understood. Our team realized that we cannot treat people with disabilities as a number, and that they offer something that no other group can give us. Our conversation with Fable has affected how we view and treat people with disabilities and accessibility needs. I highly recommend their services if their candidate pool fits your needs.
Executive Sponsorship Helps
One of the things I learned from Jaime at ServiceNow was the importance of executive sponsorship. The more you can create a business case for this work, the more support you’ll have. For example, find company wide goals and see how creating an inclusive research practice could positively impact them.
Gaining executive sponsorship keeps the momentum of inclusive research going. When you hit roadblocks or there’s turnover there will be someone to continue to push the work forward. It is also helpful for creating buy-in: if an executive owns the project the more likely others will jump on board and want to accomplish your goals.
For us at Auth0 that means looking at our vision for the fiscal year and aligning our objectives with the overall goals of the company. For example, our mission for the next few years is to grow active users. Accessibility work can improve the experience of all users as well as draw in new ones. This is one way we can encourage leadership to support our objective to become an inclusive research practice.
Training Matters
The importance of training is something I heard emphasized in multiple conversations about inclusive recruiting, but it is often overlooked. At Auth0, we use a democratized research model. Democratized research practices open up research to all who are interested. Our team helps designers, product managers, product marketers, and pricing and strategy experts complete research. For us to have a true inclusive recruiting practice we would need to have formalized training for all potential researchers, not just our team specific researchers.
My research into accessibility training showed that these efforts are generalized and unhelpful. Most programs covered what accessibility means and how to be WCAG compliant. There is a need for specific training on how to conduct research with people with disabilities and accessibility needs. Divya mentioned in her time doing research at Reuters she did not always feel prepared for interactions with folks with accessibility needs in her research. A challenge she faced was with moderating sessions with those who use screen readers.
Training is easy to overlook at the beginning of the inclusive research journey. However, inclusive research practices need to look at the whole picture, not just a snapshot in time of the process. In order to have quality interactions with people with disabilities or accessibility needs, training needs to be put in place to make researchers and participants comfortable.
Where We Are Now
We have made progress, but we are still in the beginning stages of our practice becoming more inclusive. We have made some small tweaks that have already made an impact.
For instance, we improved our panel questions that focus around inclusivity and accessibility to be more open and less diagnosis-based. In the past, we used a more clinical definition of accessibility needs. These related to how people used computers. This included motor impairments, cognitive impairments, mental impairments and visual impairments. Now, we use a more open definition of accessibility needs or disabilities that allow for more nuance, as can be observed in the image below.
This change in language had a drastic effect in a recent developer survey. We had 602 respondents, and 12.5% of them identified as someone with an accessibility need or disability. For reference, our research panel beforehand showed that approximately 1% of our candidates had an accessibility need.
Finally, we are excited to continue our inclusive research journey with Community Integrative Care in the UK. The partnership with research is still in its infancy, but we are excited for what is to come in the future.
Special Thanks
I wanted to take this opportunity to give a special thank you to Divya Pal and Jaime Young for their support and knowledge. Their support helped me continue to pursue this work, including writing this very article. Thank you for all that you do to push this work forward!
