In the Design System Team, we've done some research to understand how we could make user research easier in NSW Government. As part of our work we spoke to researchers, service designers, operations people, managers and analysts from inside and outside of government. We also ran a survey and observed some research teams.
User research in government can be tricky
Not everyone understands why we should do user research or how it's done. The amount of work involved, and the budget needed aren't always well understood either. It's hard to recruit the right users, and it's hard to share and reuse research. It turns out that it's not just government that faces these challenges; these are challenges in the private sector too.
Consent forms are a big hurdle
One of the things we learnt was that creating consent forms is a time-consuming and sometimes confusing process. The content varies between teams and jurisdictions. Some teams have one document, others have two separate documents (an information sheet and a consent form).
The lack of standardisation means teams doing research for the first time have to create these from scratch. People often use existing forms from other projects or jurisdictions as a starting point, but they're not necessarily right for the research they're conducting. They often need to be tailored significantly.
Teams may not realise straight away that modified forms may require fresh legal and privacy reviews to make sure all the bases are covered. This all leads to a lot of unnecessary duplication of effort across government and lengthy lead times.
This as one of the areas where we can help!
Our team did further research to find out what a good standardised consent form might look like and found it should be:
- Easy to read. Over 40% of Australians have low literacy levels, so forms need to be easy to read.
- Informative. It primarily needs to capture consent, but it should also explain to users what their rights are, and why we're doing the research.
- Simple and quick to tailor. Researchers are often short on time.
- Compliant with legal and privacy requirements.
- Just right. Not too long but not too short, around 2-3 pages usually.
Prototyping the Consent Form Builder
We've created a prototype that we're calling the Consent Form Builder to make creating consent documents easier. It contains a set of 'snippets' (both optional and core) you might find in consent forms and participant information sheets. It makes it easy for people to choose the snippets they need for their project and leave out the ones they don't. It also helps them understand what information needs to stay.
The prototype is designed to test whether this tool will be useful to teams conducting research.
The first iteration of the prototype is aimed at a few research scenarios, but not all. We're starting small and will build on it over time. We started with forms that can be used for research that involves:
- adults able to provide consent on their own behalf
- non-sensitive topics
- publication of anonymised research findings.
Sensitive research topics (for example, domestic violence or health matters) are a bit more complicated. The same goes for gaining consent from children. If you plan to publish or share findings that are not anonymised, you will need additional levels of consent. We plan to look at these scenarios in future.
If you want to use the consent form builder for these kinds of projects, you may need to work with your legal team to add a few extra clauses.
Get involved
If you would like to work with us on this project, please get in touch! We'd especially like to chat to more legal and privacy teams from across government.
We're also looking for people who can help us test the forms with more users and build out the clauses for different research scenarios. You can get in touch with me at Jessie.Callaghan@finance.nsw.gov.au, I'd love to hear from you!