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.
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.
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.
This paper analyzes the unique challenges of conducting participatory design in large-scale public projects, focusing on stakeholder management, fostering engagement, and integrating participatory methods into institutional transformation.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Code for America highlights the importance of recognizing the effects of intergenerational trauma on communities that have been systemically marginalized when conducting research.
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.
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).
