Funding User Research

--- tags: website-content --- # Funding User Research Good UX design is all about putting the user first. Any aspect of a website, app or software that doesn’t consider the end-user's needs is ultimately doomed to fail. A huge part of the UX design process is getting to know your target audience: what are their goals? What are their challenges? What motivates them, and how do they move? Experiences should be built for these people. ## Problem ### Open Source Projects Open Source projects often lack quantitive data on usage behaviours. Contributors to these projects usually consist of highly technical users. With little to no funding for research — design and engineering contributors are left to argue their personal opinions on things that impact people globally. To avoid the whole thing continuing to be an exclusive echo chamber, we have to work to be more inclusive.[^1] ### Small Startups Early stage startups, like Open Source Software, usually skip the research phase because they lack resources. ### Small Markets with no Public Data In many fronteir markets there is also a lack of public information -- these emerging markets are often left out of design considerations. ## Solution We must strive to make informed decisioned by the collected responses of end-users — not simply your own personal set of preferences.[^2] 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. At BED.MONEY our goal is to help designers and developers in the process of creating open source payment systems to better identify the main problems their current and potential users will encounter. We do this by examining emerging markets, technologies, and adoptions occurring all over the world. With this information we are able to dive deep into new frontiers and establish highly accurate and valuable user personas to be used in a variety of ways by our clients. We’re not solely interested in learning about our users, we want to learn from them as well. The reason this aspect of our model is so important (and ultimately what sets us apart) is that we aim to help our clients widen access for their users. So many projects in the payment space call themselves "global" and yet there are many smaller regions left out of their territories. This is one of the core discrepancies BED.MONEY seeks to address. ## Method BED.MONEY user personas are not abstractions—they are real flesh and blood people with distinct behaviors, preferences, and frustrations. By studying these people, bitcoin and payment companies will be able to more deeply understand the challenges and opportunities in their specific spaces. After coming to understand these personas and what makes them tick, companies will be better positioned to: 1. Make more informed decisions related to adoption and user experience. 1. Avoid bikeshedding. 1. Provide reliable data so that stakeholders can more effectively rationalize their decision making. Naturally, conventional research into these areas and the subsequent generation of user personas is a costly endeavor. What sets BED.MONEY apart from the conventional is that we are able to empower organizations who are usually unable to perform user research due to lack of resources. By bringing small to medium sized payment and bitcoin companies together and allowing them to pool their resources, BED.MONEY can facilitate user research outputs on par with much larger operations. Since we are targeting frontier markets, we also have access to a much broader and more diverse participant pool, which ultimately leads to better, more inclusive software. The proof is in ultimately in the pudding, but why don’t we just go over the kind of work BED.MONEY actually does. ## Particulars At BED.MONEY we: 1. Assist in the development of research questions (in collaboration with other like-minded organizations) that deliver actionable, understandable, and valuable data from a wide variety of potential users 1. Utilize a varied toolkit of research methods and techniques 1. Design the research surveys in a mutually beneficial way for all organization involved by leveraging the overlap between target users 1. Meticulously plan your interview questions and scenarios 1. Recruit research subjects from wide socioeconomic and global spectrums to ensure diversity of experience and data 1. Integrate existing or in-the-works software from our backer organizations into the research 1. Build upon a shared codebase, thereby creating efficiencies and magnifying the potential of our research outputs 1. Execute all of our research in-house 1. Deliver reports with actionable insights for backer organizations After we take in our data, we process it, anonymize it, and clean it for final report delivery. Since our clients are potentially entering into these crowdfunded arrangements from different sectors, the reports are all custom-tuned to the individual needs of those specific clients. Even though individual clients are cooperatively facilitating the research, we want to make sure that everyone gets exactly what they’re looking for. At that point, the research is then uploaded to a central repository where it can be accessed by all stakeholders. ## The Open Source Approach But crowdfunding is only one part of what makes our approach so effective and intuitive. Once our research has been completed and reported out, it does not just wither and die on our servers. We take an accumulative and public-facing approach to this data. That means that future and past clients will have access to the ever-expanding research pool as we take on new clients and research projects. This gives more power and access to smaller and medium sized companies. We can also stoke the fires of innovation by giving open-source organizations — groups who historically do not have the funds to facilitate research — access to this data. We’re well aware of the privacy concerns this kind of work entails. Rest assured however that we are militant about subject anonymity and highly constrained modes of contact between researchers and subjects. Sometimes, even we don’t know who are subjects are. In the overwhelming majority of cases, BED.MONEY adheres to General Data Protection Regulation, even if the clients we are working with are not based in the European Union. At BED.MONEY we strongly believe that accessible user research should not exist solely for the use of large corporations. We’re also dedicated to helping open source contributors deliver effective software solutions in the payment space. In that spirit, we have dedicated ourselves to facilitating wide scale access to these lucrative payment spaces with our crowdfunding model. [^1]: https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/designing-better-user-experience-open-source-software [^2]: https://medium.com/@tamireiss/always-be-getting-feedback-34a4f7265590