Alerting the organization about our study

One last thing to do when we’re getting ready to run a tree test (or any other unmoderated research): we should tell our organization's support channels that we're running a study.

When participants are invited to do the study, whether by email or by clicking a web ad, they may want to check that it’s legitimate. This is especially true for organizations such as banks who are frequent targets of phishing attacks.

Because of this, we may get a few people contacting our customer-support staff to ask if the invitation they received is for a real study. If we have informed them beforehand of our research, that makes things easy for them and for the participant.

When we inform support channels about the study, they may inform us in turn that they have certain guidelines and procedures for contacting customers. (In fact, a few larger companies are quite strict about this.) While jumping through these additional hoops is never fun, it’s usually better to find out about them before our study runs than having to ask forgiveness for our ignorance of them afterward.

Finally, we should remember that informing support channels is not only polite and efficient; it’s also a bit of free internal publicity for the UX work we’re doing.

Next: Chapter 8 - key points