Two Approaches to Promote Trust in UX Data Collection

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This week in class we discussed experimental designs for UX and data at scale. One topic I found interesting in class was the topic of ethical data collection. UX research often requires significant amounts of data and it is important for researchers to be ethical in the data collection process. In an effort to ethically collect data, researchers should consider what information they need to collect, rather than collect as much data as possible. By limiting the information collected, UX researchers and users share a common goal of protecting the privacy of the information shared by the users. It is a strategy that may be help in promoting trustworthiness of the researchers.

This approach, coined privacy by design, (Crowcroft, et al. 2018) may be particularly useful when researchers are approaching sensitive topics or interacting with already vulnerable user groups. As a hopeful civic technologist, I find this to be particularly compelling and plan to apply this to my own work.

Returning the data to the communities from which it was collected is another way to ethically collect data and promote trust. (Design Justice Network, 2016). Communities and users often partake in asymmetric transfers of knowledge with researchers without any knowledge of the wisdom they helped create. This trend can be changed if UX researchers shared insights with those they collected information on after it is analyzed. This cyclical knowledge transfer has opportunities to empower users and their communities, and helps foster trust among the groups.