Ensuring user research remains ethical

User research is about putting people at the heart of anything you create and designing with your audience front of mind.

It starts with sketching out your audiences and developing them into user personas – you may have more than one user persona within your fundraising, service user, research, volunteer, or campaigner audience groups.

There are a number of different types of research you can do with people who are representative of your user personas. Research will help you to learn more about what they think and feel. You could conduct surveys, organise focus groups, or use ethnographic techniques to run interviews, for example.

Do charities really need to invest in research?

It’s easy to assume that you know a lot about your audiences because you interact with them all the time. But could you predict subtle differences between audience groups or how most of your user personas might actually complete a task like searching for information on your website? User research can help fill the gaps in your knowledge.

It’s an opportunity to learn about what your audiences need from the particular product, service, or campaign you are creating. Even if you are convinced that user research is valuable, your next question is likely to be: how much does it cost?

It might seem like cost-saving to skip the research stage and move on to development. However, behavioural psychologist Dr Susan Weinschenk found that investing in user research saved around 50% of unnecessary work for programmers and developers working on digital products. It’s much cheaper to resolve problems at the design stage than it is at the development stage. In fact, at the development stage, it’s ten times more expensive.

Create your own ethical standards

There is no legal requirement in the UK for user research to be approved by an ethics board. It is up to organisations to develop their own standards and approval processes.

In the charity sector conducting ethical user research is especially important because people from vulnerable groups are more likely to participate.

The ethical research standards you create for your charity might include some of these principles:

Always seek consent

Get informed consent from your research participants. They should understand what you are trying to research, how you plan to conduct the research, how the results will be used and what will happen to their data.

In 2012, Facebook famously ran an experiment showing more happy content in the newsfeeds of one group and more sad content in the newsfeeds of another. They didn’t seek consent and faced intense media scrutiny over whether the research was ethical – especially given the findings that newsfeed manipulation did affect mood.

Opt out at any stage

The people taking part in your research should be aware that they can opt-out at any time. Explain this before the research begins and let them know what to do if they change their mind about being involved.

Champion diversity

Your research participants should be representative of the audience groups who will be using the product or service that you’re developing.

When diversity isn’t championed it can lead to serious problems further down the line. Algorithmic Justice League Founder, Joy Buolamwini, discovered that facial recognition software misidentified women of colour 40 times more than white men. The software has been used by developers globally, so the problem has ballooned.

Protect vulnerable groups

You may need to conduct research with people from vulnerable groups who are supported by your work. Checks to ensure that they are safeguarded through the research process will need to be adapted for each group, but there are some general guidelines.

You can ensure the potential benefits of the research outweigh any risk of harm, offer a chaperone, protect your participants’ confidentiality, and safeguard their ability to make their own choices, for example.

Think carefully about how you phrase your questions so they are asked in a way that is trauma-informed and less likely to be triggering for participants. Instead of asking, "how would your lived experience influence the way you search for information on our website?" you can ask, "how would you search for information using our website?"

Fairly represent your participants

It is important to accurately represent the thoughts and feelings that your research participants share with you. Using direct quotes from transcribed interviews and focus groups in your research reports can help to prevent bias creeping into your analysis.

Compensate fairly

It is always a good idea to include some money for ‘thank you’ payments as part of your budget, but perhaps there are other ways to compensate your research participants for their time as well – one-to-one support from your experts, for example.