Ethical UX Research: What is it & How to Conduct One?
When you’re designing, you’re probably into a designing business, serving a business, or leading to a business model in the future. And business has ethics. You can’t think of a social contribution or welfare if your business model doesn’t follow ethics. Perhaps you’re looking for a dark web platform to run your business. However, in the apparent world, things don’t work like that. If you want to create a website you have to follow certain norms & protocols. If you want to promote your business online you have to compromise on certain grounds. If you need to reach your target audience, you have to undergo certain ethics!
Ethics can be classified into varied categories. In this section, we’re particularly going to address ethics involved in UX Research that you want to conduct over your target users & website visitors. You may witness a severe necessity of reaching your potential consumers & website users in the future. The reason is user experience. Whether you’re fresher or experienced in web designing, you have to conduct some form of UX Research to evaluate the user behavior on your website. The question is how?
To get the answers you have to extensively go through this post & apprehend how you can enhance your website UX for the future by initiating research like that. But before you’d like to know about our fine company & services.
SFWP Experts is an Award-Winning Custom Coded WordPress Website Design & Development Company & our amazing designer team consistently follows what web designing trends exhibit across time. If you doubt your website’s UX for poor online performance you can consult our web design professionals anytime!
What’s an Ethical UX Research?
A UX Research is basically your attempt to talk to a regular user about your website performance, its visual representation & UI. Visiting a website is not just a medium for buying a particular product or service. Users consider it as an experience. If there won’t be any experience, why would they come back to you in the future? Furthermore, a website UX comprises different elements that you need to take care of. During the research, you can ask for the user experience associated with all these elements separately or collectively.
Coming back to ethics, you always need to follow certain conventions to serve the user’s convenience. If not, the consequences may lead the user to report against you. An Ethical UX Research could depend on varied factors affecting its nature & level of consideration. Enlisted are the most essential out of them:
- An appropriate reason for the research
- The time period you’ve got to conduct the research
- The ultimate objective of the research
- Different segments of the research you want to cover
- Budget for conducting the research if any
- What ethical procedure you’re going to follow
- A requirement of a team if any
- The UX pitfall you need to overcome
- Potential tools, techniques & strategies you need to follow
The most important part is ethics. The ethical procedure you’re going to follow must entail 3 important principles as- Being Respectful & Kind to the User’s Concerns, Involve shareholders & Colleague’s Mutual Consent, Respect Norms & Protocols Related to Social Science & Human Subject. Always go for expert advice before getting started with your UX Research Campaign!
How to Conduct an Ethical UX Research Effectively?
To make sure that your UX Research is ethical you have to check out certain aspects. There are many factors other than the user research principles we have discussed in the previous section. In fact, ample users could open doors to ample situations. Following that, we’ve got you the main points you have to remember amid conducting your research campaign ethically. Just go through them:
Maintain Integrity
The famous quote “Honesty is the Best Policy” fits our opening point perfectly. Your participants are your top companion in this journey so you can’t do fraud to them. If you don’t tell them your purpose, they will surely hesitate to assist you initially. No one can share their personal information with you until they know you extensively. However, remember one more thing. Don’t broadcast your company’s secret information & data assets ever with the users. Otherwise, also they don’t have anything to do with that. Everyone knows that, right?
Be Conscious of User Behavior
Always remember that the research is largely user-centric, not UX-centric. There could be a possibility that whatever the user requests from your website UX could become a trend in the near future. So you can’t force on implying whatever you’ve got, by arguing with the user no matter how innovative your designing ideas are. Instead, you can sort out the situation in a humble & considerable manner. As such, you have to ensure you are with them and see into the concern carefully and come out with a potential solution.
Pay Attention to the Participants
An online survey is not a prank. One mistake & you can kick yourself out of the trend that most of your competitors are following. They know how they could impress their target audience presently & in the future as well. Listening carefully to a speaker’s interest is the foundation of ethics, whether in business or website designing campaigns. So what you need to do is to simply note down or record whatever the user suggests & discuss the same with your designing team to make sure whether you can collectively entail a solution for it or not. Thereafter, respectfully share your results with the users & evaluate their response.
For added support, you can reach out to SFWP Experts and share your Ethical UX Research Strategy with our skilled web designing & development professionals. We’re a San Francisco-based Conversion-Centric Custom WordPress Website Designing Company serving multiple SMBs across the globe!
Proper Consent
The data you collect from the user could be in the form of audio, writing, voice, video clips, etc. This data should never be robbed. If any of your workplace team members does so, in a hidden manner, you can file a case against him or her too. Make sure that your business reputation isn't affected by your own people. Whatever data you’ve got from the user, it should be legitimate & following the user’s consent anyhow. If the user isn’t ready to share his views, don’t push him & switch to another participant. You can create a list of participants by offering a contact form on the contact page of your website.
Don’t Misuse the Participant’s PI
The personal information of the participant you have collected is the trust he puts in you. If you’re misusing the same for your website promotion plans you’re surely going to witness harsh consequences. Even Facebook has been addressed as a culprit once for manipulating user security & everyone knows how its reputation declined a few years ago. If you’ve just started with your website-building campaign, you can’t afford to bear such circumstances. Stay safe!
Conclusion
No matter how renowned your business is, you have to maintain adequate disclosure of your activities & operations before the government, users, clients & shareholders. Your business is your relationship to all such entities so you can forget your share of business ethics. At SFWP Experts we consistently remind you about your web designing extreme & average. Let us assist you in initiating your next UX Research Strategy as we’ve got the best team of Custom Coded WordPress Web Designers & Developers waiting for you. Let’s talk!!
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