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User Research Guidelines

Last edited by Loïc Dachary
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We aim to treat our research participants with utmost respect. Our main priority during research activities is their well being, preserving their privacy and anonymity.

We treat participants not as research subjects, but as co-creators of insights that can help us improve Enough. We are immensely thankful for their time, and for their willingness to share their knowledge and experience.

We aim to create trustworthy relationships with research participants, if they are willing. We do this because we are committed to keeping our users at the centre of our software design process.

We publish these guidelines because we want to be transparent about our research practices, and ensure that Enough community members and others know what to expect from our research activities. We also hope these guidelines might help other projects with their own research work.

If you have feedback or questions about these guidelines, please leave a message in the UX forum category: https://forum.enough.community/c/ux/9

  1. We aim to capture data from all our user research activities for analysis purposes. We obtain informed consent (written or verbally) from research participants before collecting data.

  2. The data can take the form of notes, audio recordings, video recordings and photographs. Before taking a photograph, we hide all visible personal information, to maintain privacy.

  3. All personal data is stored password protected and encrypted on the personal machine of every member of the UX team and is destroyed when the member leaves the team or when it has not been used for over six months, whichever comes first.

  4. Photos, audio and video recordings are transcribed. Once transcribed, the audio file is deleted from storage. Transcriptions and notes are reviewed every six months. If we feel we have nothing else to learn from them, we delete them. This is to preserve participants' privacy.

  5. All research data, except video, is anonymised. In notes and transcriptions we use pseudonyms instead of real participant's names, and we remove all personal information such as locations, institutions and third-party names. We aim to anonymise photographs before we take them by hiding all visible personal information. We further obfuscate photograph content as necessary.

  6. We share the anonymised transcription with the research participant by email, to ensure it accurately portrays the outome of the research session. Participants can request amendments. They can also request the destruction of the data by sending a simple mail to ux@enough.community.

  7. Only Enough user experience community members have access to research data by default. Other Enough community members can request access to the research data, which is likely to be granted.

  8. We will never publish research data without consent, but we might quote from notes and transcriptions in research reports and presentations. As part of the informed consent process, participants can request not to be quoted.

  9. The research analysis process is carried out by Enough community members using the affinity diagram approach.