Building a Culture for Policy Within UX Research

all right top of the hour I think I think we're ready to get started all right so here we are guys this is this is our last presentation of the quarantine virtual insights conference and thank you everyone who has attended everyone who has presented this has been great it's far exceeded any expectations that we had about you know how this was going to go you know it's been wildly popular and we are really happy to have been able to you know bring some research nerds together and talk shop for the past couple of days and we're gonna end on a bang final presentation and this is going to be I'm skipping the rules the rules are out the window at this point you know rule number one being we have got the mercy of the tag guess what it's cooperated with us the whole time this is ridiculous you know R attempting fate at this point but we've got one left and feeling pretty good so yeah still be respectful I think that's an important but you've already done the networking and engaging so what more could we ask for so onto our final presentation of the day this is Beth Guido research policy program manager at Facebook she's gonna be doing a talk on building a culture for policy within UX research and this is gonna be a bit of a pivot from the presentations we've had thus far which have been sort of the hour-long webinar format the S presentation is going to be more you know quick hit I think you know the perfect talk for her last of the day when everybody's starting to get get a little bit tired I think it's gonna be a great change of pace I will say that it being the final and you know it's 6:00 p.m. here on the East Coast so it's it's our conference cocktail hour so if you you know drink them if you got them I'm ready to go with my my ale in a mason jar of course because we're in the south also using my coaster which is repurposed floppy SPSS disk for no unsightly water marks on the table I'm gonna get out of the way I'm gonna let Beth do her thing and have at it awesome thank you bill can you hear me okay yep awesome so I'm knockin on with that tech go smoothie for my final talk as well let me go ahead and bring up my slides okay so uh hi everyone I am thrilled to be closing out this quarantined virtual insights conference for you all and I'm really excited in particular to bring you this lightning talk about policy over the new extry search and how we can build a culture within our teams that supports and promotes policy compliance in a way that empowers and enables great research so first just a little bit about me my name is Beth cuido I'm a research policy program manager at Facebook I've been at the company for about three and a half years now and I'm a member of our central research program management team within our wider UX research operation this organization and I'm responsible for the array of both legal and best practice policies that our researchers follow when they are conducting product research studies and my program primarily supports UX researchers but does also provide guidance to other research functions at the company marketing research some survey science researchers or functions that do research activities but may not formally identify as researchers and I also thought it might be helpful to share a bit more about our research program management team that I'm a part of and what we do I know design operations as a function has become pretty well-established and research operations specifically it's growing as well albeit not quite as quickly so within the context of research operations our research program management team builds and scales programs to strengthen the impact of our amazing research team and we do this in a number of different ways so we see ourselves as knowledge managers making sure that our researchers always always have access to the right information and resources they maintain our resources as sources of truth and our philosophy is to ensure that researchers have relevant information at the right time to help them do their jobs we're also connectors between researchers teams and information so we aim to connect researchers with each other which is incredibly important as arguments research team is quite large and distributed and has grown rather quickly in the last couple of years and this can either be researchers a researcher a team to team or pillar across pillar and of course connecting people to information as I called out in the first point we also of course as an Operations team operationalize our tools and our resources particularly to ensure that they stable again given the growth in size of our team this is an incredibly important focus for us and another focus of our team is ensuring infrastructure is built and as is as efficient as possible and again of course always with scalability in mind and finally we solve problems we do this primarily by addressing operational hurdles and wherever possible we really aim to take on the logistical challenges of research execution for researchers so that they can truly focus on research and as I mentioned earlier I'm responsible for our policies for UX research which are designed to provide formal support and structure to make sure that how we're conducting research complies with our legal responsibilities to our users and I'll speak a little bit more in a bit about how the program is structured to accomplish this but I wanted to pause here and thought it would be important first to talk a little bit about the Y which is really key to everything that we're doing in this area it's something that we come back to a lot as the space continues to evolve and evolve rather quickly and it's also integral to how we communicate about policy within the research space so want to highlight here why does research policy matter why is it important to researchers why is it also important to leadership and operations teams alike to think about so first protecting our users privacy and data and ensuring that they have a positive experience when they're participating in research studies has always been incredibly important and on the larger world stage we've seen privacy and data protection become increasingly formalized around the world with regulation like the general data protection regulation or gdpr which I'm sure most of you are familiar with enacted in the EU and May of 2018 the California Consumer Privacy Act which came into effect at the beginning of this year for California specifically and a number of other countries around the world that are looking to develop their own privacy laws as well and second as a research organization we have a responsibility as the representatives of the people that use our products and services so not only the thought leaders and best-in-class when it comes to the quality and the rigor of the research that we do but to foster a culture where we conduct research in a way that is thoughtful compliant and protects everybody involved and I use the term culture really deliberately here and we have a motto at Facebook that people say and it's up on our walls throughout our buildings that nothing is someone else's problem and what this means is that every person at the company has a responsibility to take charge of solving problems and creating positive experiences for the people we build for across the world and we take this to heart when it comes to research policies as well and so every researcher own this applying policy guidance to each and every one of their studies and we holistically baked guidance into the entire research lifecycle from study design and recruitment to conducting our sessions analyzing the data and then sharing out those insights there are policies applied and standardized processes for implementing those policies and I sometimes describe it like this if research were a relay race the policies would essentially be the baton and as a program manager my goal is to continue to activate this culture and ensure that the policy program provides structure support and tools to make sure that our policies are not only effective but also easy to follow which brings me to the structure of the policy program itself so there are really four primary pillars first is policy creation and development which probably comes as no surprise I spend much of my time collaborating really closely with our legal partners to understand the policies need to follow how they apply to research specifically and once policies are identified or a change to an existing policy is identified they move through a standardized development process which ensures that each one is given the consideration it needs is approved and rolled out to the team successfully of course also core to the work is educating the team and making sure researchers have easy access to resources and support and this includes making sure our resources are always up-to-date and findable with consistent information that source of truth if you will that I mentioned earlier and that work providing really robust live and engine and training for both new and tenured researchers and in order to make sure that our policies are not only a compliant but efficient and smooth for researchers to put into practice we need to have the right tools and the systems in place to both support and streamline that process so of course infrastructure is incredibly valuable and important here and we really focus on tooling and automation as much as you can to reduce the time researchers are spending and we ourselves and operations are spending manually moving the processes forward and finally last but definitely not least our relationships so policy development is highly collaborative and there are a number of teams who work with us to define and iterate upon our policies and this is incredibly important component for the program and if your team is looking to build out more formal support for policies I'd recommend putting a lot of time and focus here in particular and spending that time building and establishing the partnerships you need to make progress building strong two-way relationship with our partners cross-functionally across legal policy comms etc has been really key to this program's success and just to give you a quick idea of some of the things that require a policy I'd spoken a little bit before at a high level on policies touching the entire research lifecycle but for some more specifics you know these include things like considerations for when research we'll be talking about are asking sensitive research questions and sensitive topics the participant management process and cycle and how people receive invitations for research helping them understand them what they're participating in and what will happen with the feedback that they provide considerations whenever we're working with our research partners we partner with many different research firms here in the US and across the world and so there's lots of considerations there and of course you know thinking about how our insights are shared with our product teams you know everything from how we create our findings and put together our readouts to how they're shared how they're stored and how we protect them and I mentioned earlier that this work is really highly collaborative and I wanted to give a bit of a sense of the scope and the scale when I talk about this collaboration and one of the reasons why I highlighted that it's one of these areas that I would recommend dedicating resources and time and people to so you know this is not an exhaustive list but a list of a lot of the teams that either provide input and approval teams that need education and support or in general plug into the policy creation life cycle so you know of course our own operations team ops teams across the company researchers of course leadership marketing comms legal Privacy Policy and even within the UX research itself you know my stakeholders are a pretty varied group on the research side we have ICS managers and leadership buy-in is really needed at all levels and for everybody to pitch in for this to be successful and of course you know my operations team which as I mentioned does a lot of the work to build the infrastructure that supports our policy and again just to highlight that two-way street so we're you know I am reaching out to these teams to get guide and some of the policies we need to be following you know they also reach out to our organization for more understanding and insight into how research works what research needs so it really is that kind of two-way collaborative partnership there and I'm also regularly working to raise awareness of our policies and how to follow them and again this happens both within the UX research team particularly as we bring new researchers up to speed but a big focus of this work is ensuring that we're standardizing our approach across all research functions of the company as well and when I'm helping a new team on board my primary message first and foremost is that research policies are a good thing they're not meant to be a blocker but rather to enable research safely and effectively in a way that's best for our researchers and our users so when there are questions about our policies and why they're here again that why question I offer three points of view so first you know we want to be good research citizens and make sure that when people are participating in research they have a positive experience and we want to make sure that we advocate as you know as researchers and as the people on the front lines talking to people that use our services and our products that were advocating for them and our policies are how we proactively protect them and finally we want to be best in class and how we execute research and as I talked about earlier part of this is ensuring that the quality and the rigor of our research is high but the other piece of this again is having our policies in place that make sure that the research we do is done thoughtfully and in a compliant and safe way so just to wrap up ultimately it's our responsibility to be compliant and detector users and one of the best ways to do this is to embed policies into every phase of the research lifecycle and foster that culture where everybody feels ownership in the space thanks that was awesome thank you thank you checking to see if we have any Q&A before we let you go no problem this is a quick one and we've had you know two days chock-full of a lot of content so I think everybody's getting a little gassed at this point I understand I thought this would be a good just button it was fantastic did I put an exclamation point on our conference you know we've got our happy hour attending it next so since I was the last to kick it off I did bring did bring my cocktail hour cocktail finish mine while you were talking are we ready we're gonna clink these thank all right all right if anybody else is clinking on the on the chat please please let us know otherwise I think that's it awesome yeah they answer everyone's question I know a lot of people have been asking about conference recordings we will absolutely absolutely be sending out archived versions of all the presentations you know give us a day or two to pull all that together and get everything posted oh wait wait wait Doug is coming through with it with the questions so it's a will not sign off just yet okay what types of measures do you take to make sure the research experience is good for respondents hmmm that's an excellent question so within our operations organization we have an entire team dedicated to the participant management experience so they're thinking about the whole holistic cycle from the first time someone receives an invitation to participate in research what that messaging is what that experience is like all the way through when someone's participated in a session what is the sign-off you know and throughout the process making sure that we're incredibly clear and transparent and can you get to with them and the touch points that we have to make sure that they fully understand what they're participating in that they're comfortable participating that they're given an opportunity to opt out if they change their mind and just making sure that from the very start of a research session all the way through to the end that they're comfortable every step of the way and our researchers receive training in this area of which the management team does a great job with the resources there because you know our product teams thrive off of the feedback that we get we couldn't do this without our users participating in research and it's really critical to us having impact in that space so we focus pretty heavily and dedicate a lot of resources to making sure people have a good experience I think that's it for questions so I'm just gonna quickly thank Beth thank all of our presenters this week thank all of our attendees this has been great you guys have been wonderful staying very engaged much appreciated it's crazy times and I think this was you know a good good distraction so you know thanks for keeping us busy and helping us nerd out for a little while thank you for having me he's out everybody my kids I