Tips to Perform User Research on Marginalized Groups

For my group project, my team was developing a product to help the homeless. While this seems like a respectable goal, it soon became clear that we were facing one massive hurdle that threatened to undermine our entire development process - how could we effectively interview homeless people while minimizing any risk to the researcher, finding participants in an ethical manner with no incentives given to them and get answers that were relevant and meaningful and actually helped us better understand our user base?

From my experience doing this project, I came up with a list of tips to keep in mind that can very effectively increase the quality of the research and reduce the effort needed to come up with a group of pilot testers from your target audience.

1. Understand Who Your Userbase Is
   This may seem like a simple point, but it is crucial to have some understanding of your user base before actually starting the User Centered Design Process. When we first decided we wished to create interfaces to help the homeless, we neglected one very important point - this marginalized group is most likely going to be very difficult to conduct research on because this group of people are unlikely to have the patience or interest to sit down and do long, complicated interviews. We had to retroactively change what research script we used very late in the process to a questionnaire because we couldn't find willing participants who were willing to do interviews with us.
2. Know What Actions Can Alienate Them
   Since you are dealing with Marginalized Groups, it is important to remember that they are in the fringe of society and that there can often be psychological issues relating to some of the things they have to deal with. When we talked to one homeless person, we realized that he became very annoyed when we asked him about his finances, or when we asked him questions like 'what do the homeless do about .....?' It was clear that he was not doing well financially and it was frustrating for him to have to talk about this. Also, he was homeless and having to constantly hear this annoyed him. We realized we should rewrite our questions like 'What do you do about.....' instead of 'What do homeless do......'
3. Know Which Organizations Already Help Them
   If it is difficult to find user testers for your research, it may be helpful to contact organizations that understand this group and already have connections with them. They themselves can provide valuable information about this userbase and provide you access to their network of marginalized individuals.
   
4.  Keep the Safety of Researchers in Mind
   The unfortunate truth is that many marginalized groups are found in high-risk situations that can also endanger your researchers. One of our group members had previously done research with a marginalized group and she reported that one of her previous team members contracted a disease from not taking appropriate precautions when interacting with this marginalized group. It is important that we help these groups but it is absolutely crucial to not compromise the safety of your researchers. Take steps to minimize any risk that can come from conducting research.
   
5. Collaborate With Other Groups Performing Similar Research
   While this isn't always possible to do, our internet searching revealed many other groups that were doing somewhat similar research, While we didn't directly collaborate with them, we learned a lot about how the User Centred Design process applies to the homeless from reading their posts. If you are finding it very difficult to conduct research, consider teaming up with groups doing similar research and pool your resources - having to share data is less deal-breaking than having no data at all.