Yee haw! The Wild West of user research ethics

Ethics is a prominent principle of user research, but what does this look like in the real world?

Currently, in many public services, the ethics of user research depends on the individual researcher or research teams on a project-by-project basis. When user research sits alongside other research functions that have established ethics governance (such as social research, medical research or Quality Improvement), it can get shoehorned into inappropriate ethics processes or let go with less rigorous ethics checks

Does user research need more appropriate and consistent ethics frameworks? This workshop will allow you to think about and discuss what consistent and appropriate ethics frameworks in user research could look like, and explore barriers and challenges that different organisational environments present and how we can come up with the best ethical approaches.

Participant takeaways:

• User research is the ‘new kid on the block’ in some public services
• Discuss the lack of consistency of approach to ethics in UR
• Space to discuss the differences in your approaches, obligations, expectations and viewpoints
• Explore different settings that user research can sit in and how to navigate these settings through user research principles and stakeholder management

Themes:

Ethics, User research, Governance

This session:

• Includes interaction
• Has a number cap: 40 participants