Removing the safety bias from user personas
@Cook County Government
UX team cultural bias can allow product teams to overlook the experience of people whose community is routinely disrupted by the threat of violence and whose family trauma has been caused by violence. User attitude surveys reveal that community engagement patterns are affected and need to be considered when defining the user journey, the persona and the product. All can greatly impact the user safety and can impact the user's engagement patterns. Our goal with this study was to discover which safety factors were dominating our user's workplace attitudes, integrate those with our user personas and improve product alignment and internal usage of personas in our organization's quest to become more user-centered.
Background and Goals
Our plan to mitigate safety bias was to utilize a qualitative methodology by conducting IDI's to determine the attitudes and behaviors that affect our user's employment engagement. We chose 20 users from the city's 5 most violent zip codes for those IDI's. We determined that those conversations would inform the team of the 3 most prominent concerns our users had in common. Our team then examined that information in alignment with the user persona questions. After we determined alignment, we incorporated them into new personas that will enable us to build organizational empathy, user/service alignment and increase adoption of our user centered design process.
Foundational Research Goals
1. Understand the role safety plays in our user's experience
2. Determine the 3 most common attitudinal and behavioral outcomes of neighborhood violence
3. Align those outcomes with user personas to create reduce safety bias and improve persona effectiveness
Design Research Goals
I1. Re-design personas to include 3 most prominent user safety concerns
3. Ensure language alignment with users
3. Ensure CJIS, HIPAA compliance with any user information
Methods
Our plan to mitigate safety bias was to utilize a qualitative methodology by conducting IDI's to determine the attitudes and behaviors that affect our user's employment engagement. We chose 20 users from the city's 5 most violent zip codes for those IDI's. We determined that those conversations would inform the team of the 3 most prominent concerns our users had in common. Our team then examined that information in alignment with the user persona questions. After we determined alignment, we incorporated them into new personas that will enable us to build organizational empathy, user/service alignment and increase adoption of our user centered design process.
Crucial Insights
Because our users were mostly stationary because of the COVID limitations on interaction, behavior mapping a depth of information that informed our collection of stakeholders about other service improvements that could benefit our youth. Because housing instability was rated as the youth's primary concern, we were able to create an easily accessible online storage space for them to store documents that they would need in case of housing displacement.
The security architecture of the site had to be updated on HIPAA and CJIS compliance measures and our authentication practices were upgraded to meet the additional security demands.
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Knowledge Takeaways
1. There is demand for individual housing emergency response tools
2. Being prepared for the cognitive walkthroughs and behavior mapping by a local homeless shelter director was invaluable for gathering a baseline of information about the homeless user experience.
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