TRIP | The Research Inclusion Project

Archie, host of the I Am Not From Here podcast joined us on T.R.I.P to give voice to the migrant experience as a global citizen, UX researcher, and community wrangler. Tune in to hear how her cultural experiences challenge the research community to broaden their migrant point of view.

Hi, TRIP listeners! We're back with our first episode of 2021! We are currently working on producing more episodes for the rest of the season. In the meantime, enjoy our first episode of the year and we’ll be back soon!

Catherine “Mickey” Hill

Mickey is a highly accomplished, passionate market research professional with a proven track record of delivering consumer insights and strategies that help build brands and grow businesses--from funded tech start-ups to Fortune 100 and 500 companies.

Mary Ann Mendez

Mary Ann is a research accessibility consultant with 20 years of market research data collection, field operations, and project management experience. She guides clients by testing qualitative and quantitative data collection surveys and research platforms to ensure these are accessible to people with disabilities. With over 20 years of experience working in research as a blind professional, Mary Ann offers a unique combination of field operations and data collection expertise along with accessibility testing as it relates to quantitative and qualitative research platforms and venues.

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Mary Ann walks us through her journey from project management to becoming a go-to resource for researchers wanting to better accommodate participants with disabilities. Today she works directly with platforms directly to set the standards and guide both the accessibility and usability of research tools.

“Accessibility is changing but usability is struggling. Understand that you have an opportunity to design your research from the beginning to include people with disabilities“ – Mary Ann

She’s an advocate of ensuring disabled participants are not excluded from research and emphasizes that small, simple shifts and inexpensive adjustments are sometimes all that is needed to accommodate participants of all abilities. She shares examples of simple accommodations that manage to make all the difference!

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How can research and insights have the most impact?  By being designed for inclusivity (and flexibility to allow for inclusive learnings) from the beginning.  Joey inspires teams to better understand their own. assumptions and engage in cross functional team members in the insights process, include and stakeholder interviews wherever possible and “bring those who weren’t on the research with you.”  He reminds us that while inclusivity is an important focus, it “doesn’t mean a lot until we are immersed in it!”

GUEST

I see as getting back to basics and not being afraid to do the legwork to find people.  Particularly how it relates to finding and engaging harder to reach targets or underrepresented groups (i.e. people who are non-binary on the gender spectrum, people with disabilities, etc.).  I feel like a lot of companies, ours included, have mastered the art of social media advertising - and that's great.  It brings in new people to MR - but often they are general market.  When things get tricky (and fun) is when you have to not only go find people or organizations to assist but have to sell them on why it's important.

GUEST

Kerry Hecht is a life long market researcher and the CEO and Founder of Echo Market Research.  Echo is a unique and cutting edge agency designed to provide flexible solutions for brands, agencies and tech companies.  Echo’s unique strategy and tactics provide a strong foundation to build on throughout the research process – and beyond.

SHOW NOTES

Hear how to ‘recruit in a real way’ from ‘market researcher lifer’ Kerry Hecht

Kerry fills a gap in the industry with a panel or community management solution. She calls on us all to do a better job of vetting, finding participants and go the extra step to create a feedback loop so the participants are learning to keep engagement higher!

“We have to evolve so be the solution and make sure the feedback is the right feedback, even though it can be a scary proposition to change gears.” - Kerry

TIPS FROM THIS EPISODE

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GUEST

Kayla Bright

Kayla is focused on Participant Management policies and compliance. She joined Facebook in 2015 as a Research Participant Recruiter and spent several years managing recruiting Facebook advertisers for research projects. Kayla is an advocate for inclusivity in the participant recruitment process within the research operations team. She attended the University of Texas at Austin where she earned her B.A. in Psychology. 

SHOW NOTES

Kayla emphasizes the importance of being open to exploring different paths and speaking to people potentially outside of your initial scope. She calls to recruiters to voice their opinions to partners and stokeholds during recruiting process and to connections with others outside of your company who also work to recruit participants to share and learn ideas from. 

In her role on the recruiting and compliance team at Facebook she has overseen a lot of recruiting since 2015! She and her team work to prioritize inclusivity throughout the entire recruiting and research process. They have access to an enviable database of 2.4B people, which she says is “a good problem to have.” But she cautions that teams with these resources be careful not to rush through the process just because “you have the numbers.” But instead reminds us that to focus and prioritize inclusivity, you may have to slow down a little bit! Slow down to ensure researchers are keeping inclusivity a priority when scheduling and thinking more broadly to include more voices. 

“We are exploring the opportunity to contact people through different tools/communication strategies (e.g. SMS recruiting) when traditional recruiting methods are not the way they typically use to communicate. It’s important to figure out to include as many diverse perspectives as we can without logistic blockers in the way, while still being compliant.”

For B2B projects that can mean including diverse types of businesses and business owners, or driving a bit further than you’d intended to hear a great story.

TIPS FROM THE EPISODE 

My first experience into design and user research was a call for researchers that came through the Northwestern Anthropology Department to do work in the black community. I jumped at the opportunity because the project was on sickle cell research, and I lost my sister to sickle cell. There is a substantial gap in diverse thought leadership and representation in the research industry. Inclusion is about more than representation but about the making real and lasting change to the status quo as a result of that. I hope for our own field to become more inclusive.

GUEST

Nikki Yeboah

SHOW NOTES

Hear how to ‘review your own identities before going into the field’ from ethnographer, oral historian, storyteller, and educator Nikki Yeboah.

Nikki reminds us that the insights field needs to look like everyone and while retrofitting inclusivity is not ideal, it’s what we’re all going to encounter in our work. She encourages us to restructure insights projects to give us the space to be inclusive in work and to value difference when the world is being organized around those insights - start from that perspective and build out.

“{Inclusion} It’s not passion that informs my work, it’s necessity. I am a part of a demographic that is often silenced. Doing this work is including myself My ritual is to journal before and after about who I and what makes my interview subject who they are on the table. Then go through what you’ve analyzed and how it impacted them” - Nikki

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MENTIONS

Some of the questions I ask myself before entering the field can be found in the Methods section of Critical Ethnography: Method, Ethics, and Performance 3rd Ed. By D. Soyini Madison, under Lay Summary.

In this episode, Katie Koehler and Jocelyn Monahan both share how inclusion drives their own work from an internal researcher perspective. They share the successes and challenges of implementing authenticity and representation in gaming. Katie shares some helpful tips as she has learned the importance of documentation in her own research to help other researchers. And Jocelyn shares how her own personal experience as a female in gaming has given her insight to product design changes to encourage inclusion for women in the social gaming environment. This episode was recorded at the Riot Games offices in Santa Monica, California, thanks for having us guys!

GUESTS

Katie Koehler

Katie helps teams at Riot Games develop their strategies and make data-informed decisions during product development. She works with teams that are responsible for building out the world that Riot's in-game characters live in (like the Marvel universe) through cinematics, short stories, and television shows. She helps teams consider how they can make content that resonates with a diverse audience (women are gamers, too!) and how they can ensure Riot's in-game characters represent the diversity of League of Legends' expansive player base.

Jocelyn Monahan

Jocelyn primarily is dedicated to systems that help drive the ways players interact with each other socially in our games. She is passionately dedicated to inclusivity both for people playing games and in the gaming industry and positive social design. Her career started in publication on social research and then evolved to understand player behavior within the gaming dynamics at Riot Games.

SHOW NOTES

Riot Games has been expanding their offerings and seek new ways of collecting data methods that reach beyond the current profile of their League of Legends player, and a need for more representation of diverse demographics. Katie & Jocelyn have been leading the research efforts to making the impact with reaching and learning from new audiences while taking more inclusive approaches. As Katie says: “Be inclusive in your design of your inclusive research”.

Katie & Jocelyn share how internal feedback has become a central point of learning and help set up for success before demographic, gender, and data collected for player representation (and the legal practices as well!). They have found identity spaces helped navigate inclusion within their own community of employees to help a more collaborative effort and open for others to share their own cultural perspective that create a representative environment.

They also shared the social experience is another part of player research where they need to understand data, and process of research planning for cohorts that are not often included because they are currently considered the “outlier”. For example, cannot design for women based on survivor bias. We can’t use data that only center  points on those that have “thick skin” who can ignore the negative comments and do not leave the game because they can tough it out.

“Creating internal documentation or ‘research on research’ if you will has become my new checkpoint of my discovery process for inclusivity in my practice”

“Collaboration has been most useful for me. Going across different products with the same purpose in mind gives more perspective and eyes on what will make the most impact.”