Library
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Procuring Differently: How Colorado Used User Research and Active Vendor Management for COVID-19 Technology
In June 2020, the state implemented an innovative and entirely virtual vendor selection process to evaluate these solutions under the direction of the Colorado Digital Service (CDS).
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18F Methods: Validate
Testing (and re-testing) your designs with users will help you build the best possible product. Our Validate Methods cover varied testing scenarios and potential user groups.
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Conducting Research with a Healing Mindset
Code for America highlights the importance of recognizing the effects of intergenerational trauma on communities that have been systemically marginalized when conducting research.
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How to create an inclusive user research environment
This article describes the necessity of building an inclusive research environment that empowers participants, as well as techniques for creating such environments in both in-person and remote capacities.
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Responsible Design for Digital Communities
This tool kit brings together emergent best practices, workflows, and tools that communities, educators, mutual aid groups, designers, artists and activists are using for community building, and how design needs to change to best suit people, right now.
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Story-driven experience research on pandemic unemployment
Dana Chisnell describes work leading a team of researchers to interview people from across the US on their experiences applying for unemployment and other benefits during the pandemic.
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User research is a team sport
User research requires working as a team, since it necessitates running sessions with participants, observing and moderating research sessions, analyzing and synthesizing results, as well as communicating results effectively.
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Challenges of participation in large-scale public projects
This paper examines the challenges of participation in large-scale public projects. Taking its offset in a case-study of the development of a new public multimedia library, the paper discusses methods and values of Participatory Design in the face of the challenges that a project of this scale entails. These challenges concern how to address and manage a heterogeneous group of stakeholders and end-users, how to inform stakeholders and establish participation as a relevant activity, the development of new techniques and technologies to scaffold participation, and the interplay between iterative development and institutional transformation.
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Configuring participation: on how we involve people in design.
This paper examines three key questions in participatory HCI: who initiates, directs, and benefits from user participation; in what forms it occurs; and how control is shared with users, while addressing conceptual, ethical, and pragmatic challenges, and suggesting future research directions.
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The CUTGroup Book: Civic User Testing Group as a New Model for UX Testing, Digital Skills Development, and Community Engagement in Civic Tech
The CUTGroup book explains how civic user testing (paying residents to test civic apps) can allow for more community engagement in civic tech. This book covers how to do UX testing, community engagement, and digital skills in one civic tech system.
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The Qualitative Research Practice Guide
This guide touches on everything from Code for America’s core research philosophy, to our approach to ethics and trauma-informed research, to specific research methods. It also includes plenty of practical tips on planning and executing research, as well as how to synthesize your findings into action.
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Why human-centered testing is crucial to building government software
This article reviews two examples of how Nava has used open-source technologies to bring human-centered testing practices to government services software.