Skip to content

Latest commit

 

History

History
70 lines (52 loc) · 6.07 KB

User-Research-Guide.md

File metadata and controls

70 lines (52 loc) · 6.07 KB
Raw

How to do user research at OFA

This is a place to document what we’ve learned about doing research with OFA and states, tribes, and territories (STTs).

We used a number of resources from the 18F UX guide to inform our work and approach.

Recruiting

We’ve worked with a few partners to recruit users for research:

  • Our OFA product owner has helped us connect with regional offices and OFA stakeholders.
  • OFA regional offices have helped us connect with TDRS users in states, territories, and tribes.
  • The Division of Tribal TANF Management has helped us connect with TDRS users in tribes.

Ethics and privacy

Building trust with participants is essential to having honest conversations. We follow the guidelines in this “Ethics and privacy in user research presentation”🔒 during research.

Here are some additional actions we’ve taken on this project.

  • New members of the research team review the ethics and privacy in user research presentation🔒.
  • Stakeholders invited to observe interviews are informed ahead of time that interviews are confidential and should not affect interactions between STTs and OFA.

Resources

Conducting research

Who is involved

Good research is collaborative. Members of the OFA data team and regional office staff have observed interviews and OFA staff have helped with research synthesis.

During interviews, here's the team makeup we've used:

  • A participant
  • A moderator: conducts the interview
  • A note taker: takes verbatim notes
  • An observer (optional): observes silently, and may help with taking notes.

Debriefs

We’ve found it helpful to have the research team debrief for a few meets after each interview. We run through the following questions:

  • What stood out about this interview?
  • What went well about this session?
  • What went poorly (for example, uncomfortable topics, awkward transitions, etc.)?
  • Anything we’d want to change?

Technical limitations

Online access and video conferencing availability

Access to online conferencing tools varies by STT. Some users are not able to access video conferencing or have systems that block screen sharing. And, some users in low bandwidth communities may not be able to join online sessions.

When conducting research with STTs, we recommend that researchers:

  • Be ready to host an audio-only session.
  • Ask users what their tech preferences are for sessions. We’ve had the most success with Google Meet, but recommend future teams test Zoom as well.
  • Highlight the phone dial-in option in case video conferencing is blocked.

Access to TDRS tools

It’s been difficult to observe how STTs use existing and past tools for a few reasons:

  • Covid-19 has limited in-person research options.
  • Some tools, like the TDRS extranet, are no longer available.
  • The fTANF.exe application only works on older versions of Windows.

Information on existing tools and reports are stored on Teams🔒.

Resources