--- tags: website-content --- # Crowd Funded User Research `Bitcoin Every Day`, `UX Reserach lab`, `UX Research Partner` Creating software for a diverse audience requires us to understand diverse perspectives and problems. We are creating an open repository of user personas and user research so open source bitcoin designers and developers can get more insights on their potential users and identify and address key UX challenges within financial payment systems and their projects. ### Abstract #### Open Source Projects Open Source projects lack much quantitive data on usage behaviours, little to no funding for research — so designers and developers are left to argue their personal opinions on things that impact a global user base. #### Small Startups Early stage startups, like open source projects, often times skip the research because they are lacking resources also. #### Small Markets with no Public Data In many fronteir markets there is also a lack of public information -- ### Methods We outline a model to fund user research on an ongoing basis. A series of user research projects which would be crowd funded targeting small to medium sized companies and startups as backers. Company in the same or adjacent industries can formulate a research problem using BED.MONEY as the bridge. We pool funds the partners and all benefit by having questions as part of the research, and their applications if it can be integrated seemless in the research process. The comapnies would mostly be in the payment industry. The benefit to these business is that usually they do not have the budgets or resources to conduct the research themselves, so pooling the money together as there will certainly be overlap in interests would be more efficient. Bring these companies together to: 1. Come up with a Research Question 2. Decide on research methods 3. Interview Planning 4. Design surveys 5. Recruitment 6. Execution Once this first phase of planning is complete: 1. We will prepare the data (anonymising, tagging, cleaning) 2. Publish the data in a publicly viewable repository Tailored for each ____ funder would be - Prepare reports specific to each backers specific interests - Use of top backers application in the research The reason the information will be public is because we conduct research in places that are often difficult to get information from. We want to not only provide value for the companies who fund the project, but to open source projects and new projects which usually don't have any funds at all. ## REF - https://fundrazr.com/posts/crowdfunding-science-changing-research-kimberly-girling