The Participant's Well-Being is Your Responsibility (feat. Danielle Cooley)

Danielle Cooley discusses her chapter "The Participant's Well-Being is Your Responsibility."

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Transcript

Dan Berlin: 0:14

Hi everyone and welcome to another episode of the 97 UX Things podcast. Dan Berlin here, your host and book editor. I'm joined this week by Danielle Cooley, who wrote the chapter, "The Participant's Well-Being is Your Responsibility." Welcome, Danielle.

Danielle Cooley: 0:27

Hi, Dan. Thanks for having me.

Dan Berlin: 0:29

Thanks for joining the podcast. Can you please tell us a little bit about yourself?

Danielle Cooley: 0:33

Sure. I am a strategic UX research consultant, I have been in the field for a little over 20 years, worked for a wide variety of large and small public and private companies in multiple industries, and have been running my own practice since 2009.

Dan Berlin: 0:54

Are there any industries that you specialize in? Or particularly like?

Danielle Cooley: 0:59

No, I am intentionally industry agnostic. My favorite thing about consulting is being able to pull learnings from one industry and apply them to another. So I recently had some some real fun with that taking a something from financial services and applying it to a healthcare nonprofit. So that was a big fun day for me.

Dan Berlin: 1:20

Nice, very cool. And can you tell us your UX origin story? How did you discover user experience?

Danielle Cooley: 1:28

I was an undergraduate student studying biomedical and electrical engineering. And in the process, I had to take this course in engineering reliability, which is basically statistics. If your circuit has three diodes, and you have a batch of 10,000 diodes, and it has a failure rate of point three percent, what are the odds that your circuit's gonna fail? And how many redundancies do you have to put in and like, are you asleep yet, it was so boring. I'm so glad other people pay attention to that. But in the course of that independent study aspect of the course, I realized it doesn't matter if all your diodes work if the user doesn't push the correct button, because they're confused. So the rest is history. So I guess if you count from then I've been doing this since I was 21, which is amazing.

Dan Berlin: 2:21

You mentioned 'if the user doesn't press the right button.' Was there a moment that made you realize that, hey, the user is so important here, where you made that switch from the diodes to the user, as it were.

Danielle Cooley: 2:36

There was a specific interface in the tools we used in that undergraduate program. Of course, this was 1990s, eight, seven. And so we had to FTP our files up to submit them, right. And without fail, you would fill out this little FTP form and at the bottom right of the dialog box was cancel. And so you'd fill it out, cancel, and you fill it out again, cancel. And it was I mean, we knew this, but it was just so natural to hit that button on the bottom-right. And of course, we're doing this at 11:59 with a midnight deadline on our assignments, right. And so it was very frustrating. And somewhere on a tiny disk, somewhere in the box, I have a screenshot of that dialog box. And I, I keep trying to figure out how I can find it and like frame it, but one day, yeah.

Dan Berlin: 3:36

Yeah. So okay, so you discovered that desire to move to the user side of things? Can you tell us about your journey? So you discovered UX? How did you wind up where you are today?

Danielle Cooley: 3:48

Sure. Well, I still claim biomedical engineering is about bridging the gap between people and technology, whether that is a an amputated limb to a prosthetic, or a failing heart to a pacemaker, or a piece of software to your brain and its cognitive function. So I maintain that I'm still on the right path. But my first job out of undergrad was as a business analyst in a data warehousing group at Federal Express corporate. And I just ended up making it my own. We had to create this front end for marketers to access the terabytes of shipping data that FedEx has. But they weren't SQL programmers, which at the time, that was how you got information from a database. The graphical interface over a database was pretty new. So we did that. And I went to the corporate library, I found a book by Ben Shneiderman. And I devoured it and they sent me and a developer to a three, four day course. And again, I was just devouring it and writing millions and millions of notes. And the developer was like, huh, like, okay, so I knew that was my thing. And after I left there, I said my next job is going to be a usability job, which was, of course, the word we used then. And did I got a job at a startup in the Boston area, moved up there, ended up going to Bentley for my master's degree in Human Factors and Information Design and worked up there for Fidelity Investments for a while. And the dot com bust happened, I had about a year to think about what was next and ended up at a consulting company, and then MasterCard, and then Enterprise rent a car, and it's just been a really fun journey.

Dan Berlin: 5:56

Yeah. And how about that decision to become a consultant, what helped spark that

Danielle Cooley: 6:01

To go out on my own as a consultant? I mean, I had worked for a consulting firm and so I knew what that was like. And for a while, I had just seen how much they were charging the clients for me and how much I was getting on the other end of that. And, and granted, there's a lot of overhead in a consulting company, but I didn't need the benefits. I didn't necessarily need all of those things, and realized that, hey, the client and I could split the difference, and it's win win. And so that was on my mind. And then, two hours after I got back from maternity leave for my first son, they laid me off, and I said, 'Oh, I guess I'm an independent consultant now.'

Dan Berlin: 6:46

Wow. All right. Sometimes it just happens like that.

Danielle Cooley: 6:49

Often, you do need something to sort of push you over, that you're on the fence, and you just need something to nudge you. And it's a big nudge. But it's worked out.

Dan Berlin: 6:59

Cool. That's great to hear. Well, thanks for sharing all of that your your UX journey, let's move on to your

chapter: 7:06

'The Participant's Well-Being is Your Responsibility.' Can you please tell us about that?

Danielle Cooley: 7:11

Sure. I had a number of experiences where we've had to be really careful about how we approach the participant in a user research study. And often it was about a sensitive topic, a horrible health diagnosis, horrible experience with incarceration, just really sensitive things. And it occurred to me that we talk a lot about how to get good data, we talk a lot about how to minimize bias. In our research, we talk a lot about process and method, right. And we tend to forget even though we're user centered, right, we're thinking more about that way end user who's going to use the product in six months. And just to remind ourselves to be aware that the people you need to focus on in that process, are these participants, right, who come in, and even in the best of circumstances, you know, they're a little nervous, they've never been in that situation before, they are probably in a strange place. Especially pre COVID. Right. There was much more in lab testing going on. So that was the inspiration for the chapter.

Dan Berlin: 8:29

Yeah, and I'm glad you did write that chapter, it's something that has been on my mind for so long, right. And to your point, we're always thinking about the the ephemeral user, the user that will eventually benefit from our work. But we're also we're spending 12 hours with these people, and we need to be very mindful about those 12 hours.

Danielle Cooley: 8:49

Very.

Dan Berlin: 8:50

Yeah, so tell us more about that. What are some of the things that folks need to keep in mind and do during that hour with participants?

Danielle Cooley: 8:57

Sure. The chapter is broken down into physical safety and emotional, mental safety. And of course, physical safety... Both of those can be sort of surface level or deeper level, right? So in terms of physical safety, maybe we might think more about physical comfort, where you've got a worthwhile chair, you've got good lighting, the room is at a comfortable temperature, those sorts of things. And then in more extreme cases, for example, I talked about in the chapter, a study I did in a car, and the car was in a parking lot, so there wasn't driving road safety involved, but we were parked in a closed car on hot days, where we all know car temperatures can quickly jumped to 110-120 degrees for no reason. We couldn't run the air conditioner during the sessions because it would short out the prototype. We couldn't leave the windows open because all of the ambient noise would come in and we couldn't hear what the participant was saying, we certainly couldn't capture it well on the recording. So we did a lot of different things like moving the car during the day so it would stay in the shade in the parking lots. But the short version is sometimes the participant's physical safety is something you really need to think about. Because if you don't, you might actually harm them. And certainly nobody wants that. On the emotional side as well, you want people to feel comfortable, you don't want them to be nervous or scared, just in general, right? We don't want to be bad people like that. But then in those very, very serious situations, when you're asking someone about their recent breast cancer diagnosis, or you're asking them about living with blood clots, right, these are really scary things. I had done a study with patients with COPD, I'm gonna blank on the it's a pulmonary disease, right, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, excuse me. And one of them said, I just don't want to think about this, I never want to think about this, I have it. I believe that person in particular had smoked. And so he felt responsible for his own illness. And he just did not want in general to talk about it. Of course, he had agreed to participate in the study. But it was a very emotionally fraught situation. And the point of the article is, of course, that we need to think about these things, because it's morally and ethically right. But also, you get better data when people feel like they can tell you the truth. That they're in a safe space, they're not worried about having to use the bathroom, or when can I get back to the air conditioning? You get better data that way.

Dan Berlin: 11:50

Yep. How do we handle that? With the more... especially on the more emotional side of things. We want to get good data for our clients and for these interfaces and experiences that we're creating. And that only comes from getting truthful, real data. So how do we get that out of participants who may have great information, but be emotional about it.

Danielle Cooley: 12:16

One thing we did, Dan, when we were doing a study with cancer patients was we needed patients who had been recently diagnosed, but we were not going to go as far as to call people who had been diagnosed that week, or even in the last two or three weeks, it's still too raw. So we tried to find a time period, where they wouldn't have forgotten how they felt, but they were maybe past the initial trauma of that diagnosis. And we ended up with people who had been diagnosed about six months ago. So they knew what was going on. And we did get great data in that study, and went on to launch a really useful, usable product for those patients.

Dan Berlin: 13:03

That's a very practical important tip. Thanks for that. And another thing that comes to mind here is that even though it's uncomfortable for the participant, that doesn't necessarily mean that they want to stop the conversation. I've had conversations with participants where it seemed uncomfortable, and I'm like,'Hey, do you want to do wanna take a break?' And like, 'No, I want to get this out. You know, this is great.' So it's also important to keep that in mind in terms of whether to stop or not, or whether they want to keep going.

Danielle Cooley: 13:30

Absolutely. And your chapter is a little bit about wearing your therapist hat. Right? Where there's a lot to that, right? But sometimes you are just there to listen, certainly you don't pretend to be any sort of qualified medical professional, but they just sometimes need to get it out some of these, especially the medical diagnoses, right, or, you know, drug incarceration or something like that is very isolating. And it's not something that you can talk about very frequently with too many people. I've taken to telling people in general, just, no one's going to be hanging on your every word like I'm going to be for the next hour. At any point in your life, no one is going to be as interested in what you have to say as I will be for the next hour. So please tell me everything.

Dan Berlin: 14:14

Yep. That's a nice little thing that people can add to their their standard intros that make people feel at ease and comfortable to get it all out. So we talked about emotional aspects back there, but what about physical, you know, what are some of the other things that we need to be keeping in mind as we have these sessions? Probably more so for the in person, I would think, but maybe remote as well?

Danielle Cooley: 14:36

Sure. I mean, there's not much you can do about someone's physical comfort in a remote session. Certainly, you can make sure they're comfortable with the technology you're using. Give them as much warning, offer to maybe call them the day before and do a practice Zoom or something like that. And that I think tends to help them feel better during the session. In person, we just want the room to be as comfortable as possible. We want that automotive study, for example, like we moved the car, right so that it would be in the shade, we ran the air conditioner between sessions to cool down the car as much as we could, and intentionally had to schedule sessions with a substantial gap. So we could do that. And those tend to be the kinds of things that we talked about always, you know, let them take a break if they need to, some of the sessions can be longer. I mean, we're getting away from that in most domains, but some of them just you need a two plus hour session to get through something. So for breaks, make sure they've maybe had a chance to use the restroom before the session starts those sorts of things.

Dan Berlin: 15:53

Yeah. Any other stories from your time of running running sessions where you had something to deal with whether it was emotional or physical, and you needed to make sure that the participant was okay?

Danielle Cooley: 16:06

Yes. And this is not my story. Although I was there, I was not moderating the session. There was, in a physical lab, a participant came in and had very overwhelming body odor. And the moderator really was sort of, what do I do with this? The moderator couldn't be in the room with the person because the smell was overwhelming. And there was another session scheduled almost immediately afterward. And the decision was made to cut that session short. And then they had to figure out how to, which is not that challenging, right? You just say thanks, we've gotten everything we need from you, here's your incentive, have a fabulous day. And so they did that. But of course, they didn't get data from that person. And then they use that extra time to bring in a fan actually and air out the room as much as possible for the next participant. So I mean, yeah, you do this long enough and you see a lot of things. That was, that was definitely an interesting one.

Dan Berlin: 17:10

Yep. You bring up a great point, though, of elegantly cutting short the session when you need to. So that's an extreme example that you have brought up, but we often have to do that, whether it is because the participant isn't right for the session, or they're obviously really uncomfortable, and they're not there. They're not talking anymore. Various reasons. There's a great skill to build up, elegantly cutting it short.

Danielle Cooley: 17:36

Yes. I would imagine there are a lot of back pocket phrases that people use for that. But yeah, I tend to just really lay it on thick about how much we learned from them, and how much we appreciate their time. And not just you're done, right? But while we've gotten so much information, maybe even tell a little white lie that we intentionally booked too much time just in case and here we go. But yeah, I've never really had anyone question it. They just say thank you and they leave.

Dan Berlin: 18:10

You got through that much more quickly than a typical session.

Danielle Cooley: 18:14

Yes

Dan Berlin: 18:14

And thanks for all that information. Anything else from your chapter that you were hoping to convey here today?

Danielle Cooley: 18:21

I don't think so. I think just keeping those participants in mind as much as that end user is a really important part of our work.

Dan Berlin: 18:31

Yep. Yep. Another story I wanted to convey here today was walking someone down the stairs for a fire drill, or actually, not a drill, it was the fire alarm going off. One of the most important things you need to do is stay with the participant, right? And make them feel comfortable as you're doing that and standing on the street with them and making small talk. I think I've done that like four times in my career. Just bad timing, I guess. But it's all about just making that participant feel comfortable, and then hopefully picking up on it on the session when you get back. Great. Well, thanks for all of that. In our final segment, we'd like to get career tips. So is there a career tip that you can convey to the UX folks out there?

Danielle Cooley: 19:15

I would say get out there and speak. Get out there and present. It certainly has been one of the most, I don't know, I don't want to overstate it right, but pleasant, positive, rewarding. And not exactly lucrative, right, but professionally profitable things I've ever done. And I was lucky enough to get some mentors who helped me start that early. There are many, many conferences and events with lower barriers to entry, you know, submit a poster, do a 10 minute talk. Some specifically have slots for first time speakers or students and doing that improves your conference attendance experience so much. It helps you meet a lot of new people, it helps you really get to learn your material really, really well. Right? You know it well enough to explain to other people then you do a good job. And it certainly helps with your just... presence. I think being more comfortable speaking to people. I'm very comfortable with it. But I'll tell you, I always want to get off the stage. I'm like, well, I'm a little sweaty, like, maybe I was more nervous than I thought. But it that certainly helps in my consulting as well. And I can think on my feet a lot better than some of my colleagues who don't speak.

Dan Berlin: 20:41

Yep. Yep. And it builds confidence. Right? As you said, you're, you're enveloping yourself in this topic. So you're going to become extremely knowledgeable about it and be able to talk to anyone about it. And that's huge for confidence.

Danielle Cooley: 20:54

Absolutely.

Dan Berlin: 20:55

Yeah. And to your sweating point, I always believe if you're not sweating a little bit, you're not doing it right, because you're not paying enough attention.

Danielle Cooley: 21:00

I'll remember that next time Dan.

Dan Berlin: 21:03

Well, great. It's been a wonderful conversation. My guest today has been Danielle Cooley, who wrote the chapter Your Participant's Well-Being is Your Responsibility. Thanks for joining me today here, Danielle.

Danielle Cooley: 21:13

Thanks again for having me, Dan.

Dan Berlin: 21:15

Thanks for listening everyone, today. Hope you enjoyed this and have a great rest of the day. You've been listening to the 97 UX Things podcast, a companion to the book 97 Things Every UX Practitioner Should Know, published by O'Reilly and available at your local bookshop. All book royalties go to UX nonprofits as well any funds raised by this podcast. The theme music is Moisturize the Situation by Consider the Source, and I'm your host and book editor Dan Berlin. Please remember to find the needs in your community and fill them with your best work. Thanks for listening.