# Followship funding for User Tests application 2

Link to the form: https://fellows.software.ac.uk/public/request/

## Justification for attending or organising the event

When filling in the questions below please consider the following points:

For attending conferences/workshops: will the conference focus on a significant field, will you meet significant researchers, will there be a focus on research software?
For organising workshops: how will the event help your domain, how will the event help the Institute, how will the event help you?
For policy related work: how might participation or organisation help the policy goals of the Institute, such as improving software and improved research (this can include people and tools perspectives)?
For other: please state reasons - note it may be good to discuss with the Institute Community Team before filling the form to make sure the rationale is aligned to the Institute and to your own objectives.

### Justification
> For requests from individual £3000 Fellowship awards, please justify how this activity is in scope of your proposed Fellowship plans or how it furthers your goals for the Fellowship. For requests from the communal pot of funding, please justify how this activity supports the goals of the Institute (https://software.ac.uk/about). For requests relating to a Fellows Inaugural Meeting or Collaborations Workshop, please give a brief justification for the request.*

This request follows a previous request for funding and to thank participants for their time following user testing sessions. It is half of a joint request that is split between fellows Bastian Greshake Tzovaras and Georgia Aitkenhead. Georgia's fellowship around supporting the co-development and co-design of software to benefit neurodiverse populations as part of a larger push towards diversifying access to software and building tools benefitting marginalised groups. And Bastian's fellowship is around bringing best research software development practices into the wider field of citizen science to enable equitable access to open source tooling.

Bastian & Georgia are working together on a co-created, open source citizen science platform called _AutSPACEs_, which will be used to investigate sensory processing and autism along with a community of autistic people and their supporters. As part of following best development practices and to ensure that the platform is usable and accessible to a diverse range of autistic users, Bastian & Georgia would like to perform user testing with a group of autistic users, as already approved by the Alan Turing Institute's ethics committee. To thank participants for their time, Georgia & Bastian would like to use some of their fellowship grants vouchers of £25 per user testing participant per session. The sessions will take approximately an hour each and will involve a single participant using the platform and “thinking out loud” about their experience. A tester will be present to take notes (for which we will seek consent), and these will be published on the project’s GitHub repository and used to adapt the platform to make it more suitable for a wider variety of users.

Georgia and Bastian had already successfully applied for funds to run 20 user tests in total. 14 of these have been completed, with approved funds to run 6 more tests. The results from these 14 previous user tests are openly published on our GitHub repository and are available to view at: https://github.com/alan-turing-institute/AutSPACEs/tree/main/00-project-documentation/community/user-tests.

Given that these previous user tests were extremely succesful and useful for the development of the platform, we would like to increase the total number of tests by 10 more. This would allow us to user test with a total of 16 more participants in a second wave of testing. This would enable us to test the improvements made since the first round with a set of new testers who are not yet familiar with the project to give a fresh, unbiased view.

Georgia & Bastian think that this is well aligned with their fellowship goals, as this work will demonstrate best & inclusive software development practices in the field of citizen science and inclusion of neurodiverse populations. We have received positive responses from our participants in previous sessions regarding the experience of user testing and also the importance and value of being acknowledged through being offered voucher payment. Each of our two funding requests is asking for 5 x £25 vouchers (a total of 10 additional vouchers) to give to participants. Georgia & Bastian did discuss the general outline of this work with Shoaib and Catherine to weigh our alternative options and agreed that this approach might be the most pragmatic one to thank autistic volunteers and support those who, for economic reasons, may otherwise find it difficult to participate.

### Successful outputs and outcomes
> Please specify what outputs (what may be produced) and outcomes (what change it could lead to) are likely to be produced from your participation in this event. These can include learning goals being met, collaborations, reports etc.*

We anticipate three main outputs of this work:

1. By gathering this user feedback we will be able to improve the specific implementation of our citizen science platform to make it accessible for a wider variety of autistic users, and ensuring that it represents their needs. This has already been partially accomplished during the first wave of 14 user tests. With the second round of testing we hope to see improvements in that area and potentially also uncover further open issues that need improvement.
2. As our outputs are all openly licensed (both in terms of code and content), the AutSPACEs platform will become a case study and demo for how citizen science tooling can be openly and collaboratively built with a diverse community that includes researchers, open source developers and the citizen volunteers that we expect to contribute. Engaging in user testing is still comparatively rare in citizen science but also research software engineering more broadly, thus it will provide an important example for others to learn from.
3. Additionally, as the outpus are open source and follow open research best practices, the tool iself will be reusable by anyone, conducting user testing could benefit and support us in creating resources around best practices for participatory involvement in research and development, which will also be openly shared.

Addititionally, we of course also expect to share our learnings on the SSI channels (e.g. in blog posts etc.)

### Additional information
> Please specify details and breakdown of the costs. For example, indicating the mode(s) of travel and its associated cost. You can also add any other additional information here.
Details of people being sponsored from your Fellowship funds

We are asking for £25 vouchers, as our testing sessions are expected to last an hour and the NIHR recommendations for public involvement in research suggest this amount, c.f. https://www.nihr.ac.uk/documents/nihr-public-contributor-payment-policy/31626#:~:text=If%20a%20public%20contributor%20accepts,National%20Insurance%20contributions%20from%20payments.

### Extra sponsored
> If you are sponsoring others to take part in this event from your Fellowship funds please give their names and email addresses below. If you do not know their names at this stage please state whether there is sponsorship of others needed in this request. In either case please provide some justification.

Not fully applicable. We are looking to thank our research study participants with those vouchers. As we haven't started recruitment yet, we do not have their names yet.