In this series of modules, we've been talking about, how do we get people to participate in our surveys in the first place. It's an important, necessary first step in having good quality survey data to actually get people to answer our questions. In the previous two modules, we've talked about increasing the benefits or highlighting the benefits of participating in a survey and reducing the cost or effort of participating in a survey as two very important ways to increase participation. In this module, we're going to be talking about establishing trust. Trust plays a third role in how we think about forming a relationship with these respondents. It plays a role in encouraging people to respond to surveys, but also can help our data quality. So we're also going to be talking about techniques for increasing participant trust in you, some of which looks similar to what we talked about with decreasing costs or increasing benefits. But it's a summary of all the ways that we can get trust as part of the relationship with our survey participants. So let's talk about the importance of trust first, right? You might think about, why do I need survey respondents to trust me? I just want their answers, I'm not going to ask them anything salacious. I just want a quick hit from them in terms of data. There's a lot of reasons why you want to build trust. Sometimes you'll be going back to a population multiple times for request with surveys. Sometimes you're going to want to have really high quality data or you're going to ask more than one question. So there's a few reasons why trust is such an important factor to consider when building relationships with participants. One is that trust helps us to reduce nonresponse, which is of course very important for all the reasons we've described earlier. The other is that it increases the willingness of participants to help in the future, right? Especially if you're doing something like asking expert users of a tool to provide feedback on that tool, that might be a population we come back to and we're going to want their help in the future. If they have a bad experience or if they were not to trust us, we're not going to be able to access them again for future help. There's a lot of research that also shows that the more a respondent trusts the survey researcher, the better quality data we get from those people. People consider their responses more carefully, they think about their responses more honestly, and they provide us with better data as trust in the survey research continues for them. We could think about a model of overall participation as this, right? You have costs and benefits kind of weigh in each other out on one side but both of those sit on this basis of trust. If there is no trust, highlighting benefits or decreasing cost isn't going to be very effective. This is a balancing act for the effort we're asking from respondents, the way we're intruding into their daily routines to get what we need from them, and the benefits that they might get from that. So it's important to consider whether a participant trusts you, right? Here's some questions they might ask themselves. Is the survey researchers just out for themselves? Will they misuse the information that I'm providing with them? Will they sell it to somebody? Or will they leak it or they just lose control of it? Will they hurt me with that data somehow? Will my response make any difference? I'm not a particularly expert in design, so maybe when I think about that design, doesn't matter. And then overall, why is the study research asking you all these questions anyway? It's always natural when somebody asks you for a favor to think about, why are they asking, could they be asking somebody else? What do they get out this type of exchange. So a few techniques that we can use to help make sure that respondents are very comfortable with us when they are answering our question or when we come to them for help. The first way is to provide ways to assess the authenticity of a survey request. Very often I see a survey, where it's just a set of questions and you float it out there, and people have no way of knowing who's asking that question, why they're asking any of these big important questions. It's good practice add a link or contact information that help explains your organization and why you're asking these questions in the first place. It's even better if there's some channel, an email, a chat, whatever, that allows people to ask questions about the survey. Who's sponsoring this? Why you're asking these questions? How did I get on this list? Why me? All of these are good ways for people to be able to feel more comfortable and more trust in this overall survey relationship that you're forming. As we said previously, another way to increase trust is to emphasize sponsorship by a legitimate authority. Now don't sell yourself short, you might be a legitimate authority. If you're working as UX researcher within a company, that company has a relationship with it's clients or customers, leverage that relationship. If you're working for a big company like Ford or something like that, people will often trust a brand that they have interacted with quite a bit. Leverage those relationships that you have as part of either sponsoring organization or even just the authenticity of yourself as a researcher who's had x number of years of experience. Or is working for a shop, a UX shop that has done this type of research in the past, right? Think about the ways that you are actually very good at what you do and signal those to respondents so they come to trust you, you're a legitimate authority in how this survey's actually taking place. As we talked about previously, as well, you can also provide a token of appreciation. As we said, before the survey if possible, it can be money, right? You can offer a couple of dollars. You could also offer information or services in exchange for people's help, right? For instance, you can say like, look, I'm giving you advanced service on my website. I'm giving you the premium package for a month hoping that you will sign up for this survey or to be a panelist on a set of surveys. There's lots of different ways you can think about offering a gift to a person in the hopes that they are going to offer the gift of their survey responses back to you. If you think about tokens of appreciation outside of just here's a couple of bucks, it really opens up a world of opportunity for people to have these gift exchange relationships with themselves and their survey responses. You also want to make sure that you're assuring that confidentiality and protection of data. It helps to have a little statement in a request to participate in a survey about how the data is being stored, what will happen with it? Will it be kept anonymously? Who has control of that data? And you want to be careful, you want to give a short statement about this. But there's actually been quite a bit of research that found that if you start over explaining protections, what it's going to do is it's going to have this chilling effect. People are going to be triggered to suddenly be like wait, why are they explaining my privacy so much? Do I have to worried about my privacy, about my data confidentiality? So you can go overly far in explaining some of these things. But it's good practice to have something in your request that says we're not going to sell your data, we're going to keep it anonymous. You don't have to worry about other people having you on their list of survey responses. We're not going to sell any of this type of thing. Helps to assure the people you have formed a relationship as opposed you're just trying to harvest them as a type of commodity. It's important, and I'm sure you would do this anyway, it's important to treat every survey request as a type of professional communication. For my students, this is often a thing I see that they do least frequently. But you have to think about, how do I use all of my mechanisms for professional communication to make the authenticity of the survey really strong? So you can use organizational letterhead, you can have personalized requests with the person's name or maybe some experience that they've had within a website or with a product. You can use good design, you can use all the tools you would use in professional communication to treat and show respect to your potential participant. Again, don' think of your participant as a commodity, think of them as a partner in research. And how would you communicate with a partner or a potential client as opposed to a commodity? It changes your perspective on how you actually ask for help from these folks. So let's distill these into some overall guidelines for increasing survey responses based off this triumvirate of reducing costs, increasing benefits, and establishing trust and a relationship with participants. So you want to use a holistic approach to design. I think most often what I see UX researchers do is they just focus too much on either just the cost. We're just going to reduce this to one question and hope to get people to answer that one question. But don't think about just that, think about benefit as well. Think about how am I establishing a trust relationship with people? Think about all of the different ways that you are diving into the experience of this particular survey respondent. You could also think about how communication happens in multiple places, right? So could be that you just put an invitation out in the world and hope people come to it. If you are doing more involved surveys, it could be that you email a prenotification, that you are about to send out a survey and then when the survey comes, people are more aware of it. That prenotification is a powerful mechanism to increase participation because it breaks through that attention barrier we were talking about. In general, best practices are to have some type of prenotification for a survey so that people are aware of it coming and it helps build trust and authenticity. Consider the social exchange you're initiating. Remember, the monetary exchange is going to be a bad road to follow, because it makes people think about how much their time is worth and whether participating in the survey is worth that time. You want to think about the survey population that you're trying to access as partners in research. And using that social exchange perspective, you can really start to think about the different design elements you're going to combine to get them to participate in your survey. You want to use multiple modes of communication to gain more participation. So again, if you doing a phone call survey, you could send a post card to alert people you're going to be calling them. If you doing a web survey, that can be difficult, but most other survey modes have a way of contacting a respond, especially for purposes sample that enable you to have multiple opportunities to build a relationship with them. You can also use multiple modes of responses. So it could be that maybe you have majorly your survey is at a web mode, but you might I have a phone number they can call if they want to speak to an interviewer. Or you send out paper surveys, but the paper survey also has a web address for where people could go and fill out responses right away. All these are ways of reducing costs and increasing the opportunity for respondents to feel like they are connected to you as a researcher. Importantly, another thing you can do is to iterate. Just like any design process, you can take the early surveys that you get, the early responses or previous surveys you've done on a similar topic, and adapt your messaging. Either find a new message to help increase participation, change message, find new types of incentives, change the mood. If we iterate based of our experiences, we're going to be able to tailor our design for the survey and the survey participation to match the needs of our population of interest. So in summary, trust is an important factor in reducing non-response. It joins increasing benefits and reducing costs in a same way, so that we're thinking about a holistic design for increasing participation in our surveys. You want to convey trust through multiple overlapping practices. This is a shotgun approach. There's no such thing as too much trust that you are going to build with your survey respondents. The other side of that of course is how much is how much effort and how much cost you can afford to start building that trust. It's important to think about the context of your participants, the design of your survey, your research goal. All of this is going to shape how much trust you build, how much effort you put into increasing your response rate and your overall outcomes for having people respond to your survey. Response rate's an important thing, it helps us to think about getting access to a population. And the better response rate we have, often the better quality of results we get. And this module has been about, how do we build trust so we can help encourage people to realize participation in our survey is a good thing to do.
