EPIC 2019 — Agency and the Contractor

The EPIC conference is always energizing. It is great to see old friends, meet young ambitious ethnographers and UXR folks with bold ideas, and talk shop with peers.

This year’s conference orbited around the theme of Agency. And there were some exceptional talks that explored the agency of users in particular.

But I left a little hungry as I was hoping there would be more reflection about agency in relationship to being an independent contractor.

Usability research has grown so much in recent years that increasingly EPIC participants are embedded researchers working full-time at a company. So it is perhaps understandably not front and center. But as a freelancer, a researcher for hire, I was interested in hearing others talk about their own experiences in relation to what projects they agree to take on.

I have been very lucky to have had the opportunity to work on some extremely interesting projects and with extraordinarily talented and passionate clients. But with three kids and bills to pay, I think I would be compelled to take on work even when I had some moral qualms about the work.

Agency is about choice. And as researchers, we are all cognoscente of how users are often forced to make choices from limited options. We tap gamification and cognitive biases to nudge behaviors in persuasive designs. We leverage habit design to reinforce the repletion of behaviors that our clients want from users. I have worked with financial services clients to try to build systems that save users from themselves, and promote behaviors that as in the users' best interests, even when it means fighting against our human inclinations. A lot of similar work is done in the health space too.

And when engaging in design, as practitioners we are revisiting over and over the ethics of this work, making sure that we are pushing to drive consent by tapping mechanics like commitment devices.

But when it comes to our own decisions, the freedom we have in making choices about what projects we take on, I feel like we turn a blind eye to the pressures and coercive forces at play that drive our choice to take on projects. It is not always easy to say no to work. It is not always viable or feasible to say no when it is desirable to do so. No one likes to feel like they don’t have choice, so perhaps it is a form of mass-denial.

I’d love to hear how other independent contractors feel.