4 Guidelines for Doing Remote User Research — Ethically

At SEEK, we’ve been experimenting with different ways to conduct research remotely (moderated and unmoderated) for a little while.

Given the current situation with COVID-19, Mimi Turner and I had to quickly whip up some guidelines for our UXers and product teams to continue conducting research remotely — while being sensitive to, and respectful of, people’s experiences.

1. Recruitment and incentives

Our processes for recruiting participants remains much the same:

• We use an external recruitment provider to recruit our job seeker research participants for us, and in some cases, our small business employers. We create a recruitment screener that details exactly who we’re looking to talk to. Mimi and I review this for the UXer or team member before sending it to our recruitment provider.
• Recruiting other types of employers (for example, our corporate and recruiter customers) is typically done via Intercom, through a pop-up. Potential participants then complete a screener survey via SurveyMonkey to see if they qualify. They then progress to Acuity Scheduling to book a time with the UXer or UX Researcher (i.e. me) in question. We try to keep tabs on who in the UX team is doing what research so our website isn’t flooded with pop-ups! The other option to recruit for these employers is via our Sales & Service teams.

Given the current situation with COVID-19, we’re currently working through how we communicate and conduct research with our job seekers, and how we can approach this with our employers.

Regarding incentives, we use an electronic gift card provider called GiftPay. This service enables us to simply email our research participants a gift voucher that can be spent at most major retailers. We have an account for both AUD and NZD.

In some cases, our employers can’t accept gift cards. So, we offer a hamper instead through Halcyon Homewares that they can share with their teams.

2. Consent forms and recording

We have a remote consent form and Code of Conduct stored in SurveyMonkey. Our UXers can copy the link and email it out to research participants a day before their session starts, which also serves as a handy reminder!

Conveniently, this consent form link also lives in the calendar invites that are sent by Acuity Scheduling.

For recording, we have a few options (we’re currently reviewing which tool to use going forward):

• Our preferred tool is Lookback. You can set up a live moderated session, and send the link to the participant 5–10 mins before the session start time. All the participant needs to do is install the Lookback extension on Chrome, and we’ve got instructions for this just in case. Recordings are handily saved in Lookback, meaning that past research projects are easily found.
• In cases where the WiFi is misbehaving — we use Zoom. If the UXer in question does use Zoom, they save their recording in our centralised OneDrive folder, under ‘Candidate User Research’ or ‘Hirer User Research’. This ensures we can find our old research again (I am a big fan of re-using previous research where applicable).

We’ve even got a sexy filing structure template for the UX team to copy:

The shouty capitals invite the user to copy the folder structure.

Clicking into the folder reveals a wonder of filing.

3. Notetaking

• On Lookback, notetakers can log in to watch the live session and take notes in real time in Dovetail. It’s really important to let the participant know that you have a notetaker online watching the session, and that some others may be watching the session after the fact. Some Product Managers and UXers have done this for me a few times now and it works quite well!
• On Zoom, the downside to this (so I’m told) is that the notetaker has to join the same meeting as the participant to watch the session — so, the participant can see who and how many people are observing them! Keeping our Ethics Principles in mind, our recommendation for our UXers is that they introduce the remote notetaker at the start of the session, and tell the participant they are only there to take notes. If others in the team wish to watch the sessions, they need to do so after the fact. We don’t want participants to feel put off or uncomfortable by being able to see a number of people watching what they are doing.

4. Other remote tools

• For conducting remote unmoderated research, we have set up an account with Validately.
• We have Optimal Workshop for card sorting, IA, and first-click tests. For both tools, we ‘turn on’ the licence as needed. Mimi and I then help the UXer set up the test.

Lastly, a few tips…and the ethics of it all

Wanting to run some more ‘hands on’ activities? Think about how you can run them digitally — it could be something as simple as a Word doc you send ahead of time. Then they share their screen while completing the activity — or even getting your participants to draw stuff out on paper. Have them email you a photo afterwards. Or like, literally get them to hold it up to the screen and take a screenshot.

Synthesising? You can do it as a team in Dovetail, all logged in at the same time! Divide and conquer by assigning each person a different note to tag up. I did this recently for a research project with our job seekers — I had my stakeholders jump into the Dovetail project, pick a note each, and tag it up. We were all doing it together on Zoom, and even had some groovy tunes playing to spur us on.

Our Apps PM Leon fiddles with Spotify…and stares at me while I screenshot him

This halves your synthesis time and gets your stakeholders really stuck into the data. You will need to go in and do a bit of a tidy-up afterwards, but the stakeholder buy-in is invaluable.

And last but not least — let’s touch on Ethics. We reminded our Product teams of our SEEK UX Research Ethics Principles — namely that they still apply in a remote context!

These Principles enable us to understand how to store participant data correctly, and how to keep ourselves and our participants safe. In light of COVID-19, we included the following paragraph for job seekers:

We appreciate that this self-isolation period is a difficult time for everyone, and may impact your ability to work, or to find and gain employment. If you have any concerns about this, do let the researchers know.

We are also asking participants at the start of each session a few questions to acknowledge the situation and give them space to talk about what’s been going on for them:

Given the current situation with the COVID-19 pandemic — what has changed for you?

How are you feeling at the moment?

We’ll also use the responses to contribute to a broader monitoring program tracking how our job seekers are going.

So, what does this have to with Ethics? By using a consent form, and actively checking in on our participants’ mental states, we give them a safe space to talk about how they are affected. We are acknowledging the situation without taking on the responsibility of solving it.

We don’t conduct research in a vacuum, we conduct it in the real world — which is messy, unpredictable, and full of feelings. We need to be able to deal with that.

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