Welcome back. When we toured the usability lab, we talked a bunch about ethical issues and user evaluation. But I wanted to bring all of those together in one short video to give you a point of reference if you need to explore this issue again. And so this video is going to take just the high level principles and a few best practices and put them together in about eight minutes. We're focusing on Informed Consent and Doing No Harm. So let's jump in. The key principle of voluntary, informed consent is critical when your asking somebody to evaluate an interface for you. That's true whether you ask them to do some specific tasks or you ask them to look at it and give you feedback or whether you ask them to just explore and try it out. And honestly it's true whether you do this in a lab or whether you do it by deploying the software to other people. Informed, means they need to understand enough to make consent meaningful. In general, that means not deceiving people. It doesn't mean you have to tell them exactly what you're looking for. But it's perfectly reasonable to say hey, we're evaluating this new spreadsheet payroll system app and we'd like you to try it out. So that we can watch you and understand more about how how people like you might use it. Or we've got a new design for an app and we were hoping we could have you do some tasks in it. Because we're trying to understand where there might usability challenges and problems that we should be designing fixes for. You can give people general information. You should be able to tell them approximately what are they're going to do. You should tell them how long it's going to take. You should tell them things like whether they're going to be recorded and if so, for what purpose? That's the information. The voluntary part means you need to make it clear, there's no negative consequence for saying no. This means it's not coercive, you don't go to somebody and say hey, you want to still be my friend? Then you'd better test my system. That's just a bad thing to do in general, but it also means that people have the right to stop at any time. It means you let people know, hey, we're going to ask you to do this. Hopefully, you'll find it interesting or at least not unpleasant. But if at some point it just feels uncomfortable, it's okay to stop. That might be all you need to say. Principle number two is do no harm. There's really three ways to think about that kind of harm. Harm number one is people who start to think this is about them and that they're being judge. And when they're trying to use your website, your app, your piece of software. They start feeling bad about themselves because they can't figure things out. Make it clear upfront if you're testing an interface, it's about the interface, it's about the product, it's not about them. Anytime somebody can't complete a task, you need to thank them for helping you figure out where the challenges are in the system. But necessarily interrupt the test. But somewhere along the way make it clear how valuable their input is. Make them leave feeling like they did something wonderful. I should also point out that for those of you who are thinking about where is the line between research which might be regulated and the usability test which usually isn't. That line starts with whether you're studying the person or you're studying the product. So for those of you in countries or organizations that have special regulations around human subjects research. The type of research regulations we may have come across back in the second course where we were looking at user research. If all you're doing is testing a product, you don't run into those. In general, usability study is not studying a person, it's using a person to study a product. Doesnt mean you don't have to be ethical, but it does mean that you have to have a very clear line about are you studying the person or are you studying the product. And if you're not sure, then you're studying the person too. Second and perhaps the one that people sometimes neglect most is you have to be thoughtful and careful about recordings. It's wonderful if you have a lab where you can video tape or if you can audio tape or screen record. But you have to be careful with those recordings that don't end up in a situation where they might hurt or embarrass the person who did this work for you going through the usability test. If people are using their own personal data, a screen recording might reveal that data. You don't want that. You need to figure out a way to either give them fake data or obscure the data. If people are struggling, a picture of them struggling may not be something that's flattering to them, they may not want to see it. Even if you think it makes a great case as to why your competitors product is not as good as yours. You don't get to decide I'm going to show somebody else struggling unless you have their consent and agreement. The third is sometimes people just find a usability test or any kind of test to be something that sets them off. This was demonstrated with some of the psychological tests earlier. Earlier in the 20th century, you could give people puzzles, if they couldn't figure it out. There were people who just couldn't let go and move on and they just went higher and higher in stress. At a certain point, if you're causing too much stress, pain and anxiety, you need to figure out how you can gracefully end the test. And though you normally don't want to lie, this might be a case where you need to. Where in order to save somebody's feelings you may want to stop a test indicating that wow, the system really malfunctioned there. It didn't do the things it was supposed to and that must have been really frustrating. In some cases you may be able to make that happen, in some cases it's enough to just say that that happened. But don't have somebody go through great anxiety, particularly if it looks like they're not able to let go of it. You want to leave people in as good a condition as you have them. So there are some best practices you may want to think about, these are ones we've seen practiced in different places. A formal written Bill of Rights and Consent Form can be a great way to start the process, something that says right upfront hey, look. You always have the right to stop. You can ask any question you want. If you need a break, take a break. If you need to get something to drink, go to the bathroom, those are all things you can do. And simply, if you don't want to be here, you're free to go. And then add in some of the statements about what are we going to do with your particular images, if we take images. Are we videotaping or are we measuring anything that you should be aware of? What are we asking you to do in the test? And be sure to give people the opportunity to ask questions. Second, people come out of these test frequently with a lot of thoughts, questions, comments. Give people a chance to debrief. You may or may not find it useful but it's useful to them. Even the simple question like so what do you think? Was there anything you'd like to ask us? It can be very informative, even if it's not particularly informative, it can be a way to help the person come to closure in what they're doing. Move on to what they're doing next, it's just a way to treating participants well. And treating participants well is a culture item, it's something that many organizations just do as a matter of course. But sometimes you have to foster that culture, it can be as simple as things like how do you make sure people have a glass of water if they want a glass of water? I'll give them an adjustable chair if you're in an environment that's uncomfortable. But it's also just treating people with respect as you go forward. So, that wraps together the core ethical concepts that we have on user evaluation. The concept of informed voluntary consent and not harming the people who are doing this evaluation for you. You can take those as you go out and design your own evaluations. See you next time.
