Q+A. 12 questions on Trauma-informed Design at Chayn
As a follow up to our workshop last week, we have some answers for our participant’s questions that didn’t get air time during the session.
The session was our second free Trauma-informed Design (TID) workshop to share some of the principles, policies and processes that guide our work.
In it, there were a ton of great questions — too many to address in the time we had. So, we’ve selected 12 that we felt were the most fitting and useful to reply to in this blog.
The workshop centred on our 8 Trauma-informed Design (TID) principles, and we discussed how they each show up in our organisational policies, product design work and user research methods, with lots of examples from our survivor-led work. It was a great chance to share our thinking and also hear from our 143 participants about some of the things that make implementing trauma-informed approaches easier and harder in their organisations.
Our principles are:
OK, let’s get into the questions…
Q1. I’m curious about ‘leave this site’ buttons, especially the ones in red. It’s interesting how they stand out, but I wonder how that impacts users, especially considering red often means ‘danger’. It’s great for quick exits, but could it be too noticeable to others nearby?
We get asked about this quite a bit. Red does mean danger in some cultures, but not in others. In China for example, red symbolises luck and happiness. We are careful in our design decisions not to bake in Western-Euro centric cultural or aesthetic norms. When we decided to create this button and colour it red, we wanted it to be visibly obvious and eye catching if a survivor felt or heard someone approaching, for their safety. We opted for a strong colour so that it would be easily clickable in a moment, over a soft and warm-feeling button that might blend into our website aesthetic, in this instance. Both choices, despite being different, can be expressions of the TID principle of Safety.
Each organisation will make their own decisions about what is right for their user, for example the GOV.UK team has done some great work recently on creating an Exit this page component. Find it on their components page, and read about their decision making process on GOV.UK’s blog.
Q2. Talking about things being messy… I’d love to hear your thoughts on the relationship between ‘time’ and principles like agency and safety. I’ve personally found doing compassionate and ethical research needs lots of care and flexibility for people to rearrange, adjust their commitment, mull things over etc. What’ve your experiences been like at Chayn — have you come across challenges with allowing for really long and immersive deep dives?
Totally agree. Care and flexibility are absolutely essential to good research practice. Time is obviously not an unlimited resource, especially when working in a non-profit, and sometimes, working in a trauma-informed way can take more time. I have seen first hand that this can clash with ways of working in tech companies and consultancies too, where the research budget may be more generous but working at high speed for maximum productivity is strongly incentivised. Time always matters.
I think it’s about reviewing which aspects of your process might take longer, and having a justification for why that approach is not just better but critical. When recruiting, we make sure that we write personalised emails with people’s names and why we want to speak with them, rather than using blanket comms. This takes time, but we consider it worth it — it usually leads to fewer drop outs later on, which can seriously delay deadlines. It’s worth drawing up some trade-offs and sharing those with your managers to help them see the benefits.
When you say immersive deep dives, I wonder whether you mean in depth research sessions with participants, to get into the detail of design work? We do this, but we allow for longer sessions, always earmarking 20–30 mins for participants to share what they’d like to, before we get into discussing our design work, which may take 45–60 mins. With longer sessions we plan breaks and are mindful to keep an eye on energy and pacing.
A lot of this comes down to setting expectations well with your team and having senior support who understand that to do this work well, it takes time. That said, there are processes that you can refine so they become more ‘plug and play’ and don’t take up time needlessly — for example we have a bank of consent forms and participant information sheets that just need small tweaks per project. You can feel free to use and adapt Chayn’s participant information form.
Q3. Some of this stuff about having “the right reaction” to what people say is really quite tricky and requires specialist knowledge and training. I’m relieved you’re acknowledging we’re not therapists but having the expectation to know what to say in potentially tricky situations, is really asking us to be therapists. (Not you specifically, but being encouraged to enter and navigate this tricky space as part of our research work). How do you come to know what the “right response” is? And how do we get better at this without trying and failing, which might actually hurt people in the process?
This is a great question, and I think relates to the last principle that I shared in the workshop, which was ‘Hope’. I’m keen in this work not to tell people that certain things are right and wrong to say, so I try not to, but I do think there are phrases to avoid. You’re right that we don’t have therapist training, and saying the wrong thing is scary. But that’s why we should raise awareness. In the workshop I gave people the guidance that it’s much more hopeful and reassuring to hear things like ‘That sounds so hard, I’m sorry that this happened to you, it’s not OK’ than phrases like ‘You’ll be OK, you’re so strong’.
I’ve noticed a lot of orgs struggle with the phrase ‘I’m sorry’ as they worry that legally this will implicate them in the person’s trauma. It’s been nice to see at Chayn that we don’t shy away from expressing our sadness that our community have been harmed. I think as a general rule though, if we can veer away from platitudes and promises e.g. ‘Things will be OK’ towards validation ‘I’m with you, I see you’ we will be much more likely to be saying the right thing.
Tad Hirsch has written a great article that I often encourage people to read, to think about the blurred lines that many of us feel when doing sensitive research, and the dangers of creating user research interactions that participants experience as therapeutic. Read the article.
Q4. Related to the point about presenting content in a structured way (but letting survivors navigate however they please) — are there any other design principles/patterns that you challenged because they jarred with TID? Or any design principles/patterns that you generally think are problematic in your work?
We have used design patterns in the past but using them is not as central to our service design work as I can imagine it is in an org where consistency across many products and services is essential (I.e. in government UX work).
Hera co-wrote an article that covers how trauma-informed decisions often trump best practice in service design. In it she describes how when designing our online therapy service, our expectations were trauma informed and based on knowledge of survivors. She said
“A trauma-informed approach to this service would:
- Expect people to not show up for the video call. It would expect them to be nervous about reliving painful memories. It would send them warm and friendly reminders, and make it easy for them to reschedule without feeling shame.
- Use work plans for its counsellors that enable them to carry out other tasks, so time and money isn’t lost if people don’t show. This is how Chayn’s Bloom service is modelled.”
Q5. Have there been times when mistakes were made during the research process and how are those handled, from a trust perspective?
Occasionally we have found it challenging to wrap up the engagement with some participants — those who tend to be in crisis — after research is complete. We want to point them to the right organisations because we cannot help them with practical aspects of their crisis (they need housing, money etc) but because they’ve now built a relationship of trust with us, they keep coming back to Chayn hoping we’ll find a way to help them. We often can’t and that’s really tricky. It’s an unfortunate reality of the system in which we exist, that there just isn’t enough support available for survivors in crisis. It’s another reason why we try not to engage research participants who are in crisis.
On the flip side, we have also been in a position where a research participant harassed our researcher and compromised their feeling of safety after completing an interview — which we didn’t anticipate well enough. It’s so important to remember the relational nature of participating in research and that participants are not neutral — they can also cause us harm. If you’re interested in relational design and research approaches that address and mitigate harm caused, I recommend you follow the work of agency Pause and Effect. Visit their website.
Something that we changed to try to address this issue is to include a new statement in our participant info form that lays out what we expect from participants and asks for mutual respect and care. Read our participant info form.
This change was inspired by chatting with William Joseph, who told us that they’d taken a similar step after a participant was abusive to a member of their team. Find out more about them on the William Joseph website.
Q6. How do you measure the impact of your services if you’re not necessarily collecting data that would normally be used to measure success?
We do the regular collection of data around usage (how many survivors are using our services) and reach (where our users are based) which tells us whether we’re reaching some of our strategic goals. The key thing to remember is that it’s not just data collection but the interpretation of data that needs to be trauma-informed. So if a person only uses our service once, and then doesn’t come back for 3 or 6 months, instead of viewing that as a failure on the part of the service, we’d have discussions about the fact that for many survivors, that’s actually healthy and in line with what they need. We’re always striving to increase the number of survivors who use our services, but we don’t equate everyday usage, for example, with impact, and we don’t usge MAU (monthly active users) as a metric of success.
We also do a lot of surveying our users to ask questions about whether and how using our services has had an impact on their healing journey. We ask users to self report on statements that tie back to how healing is defined in our theory of change, with the big caveat that healing is not linear, it’s messy and often includes set backs. The things we measure include a survivor increasing their education/awareness about trauma, their feeling of ability to take positive steps to support themselves, and confidence in planning for an empowered future, to name a few.
Q7. When you are doing research you should try not to influence the answers given — but this could seem very impersonal. Eg. Someone reveals something very important to them — and the researcher just goes on to the next question without showing any normal human response, such as sympathy. How do you deal with that as a researcher?
It’s important to clarify here that there’s a difference between responding with warmth and humanity and asking leading questions. Always reflect and respond to what the person is saying, rather than just moving on, especially if they’re trusting you with something personal.
I think you can be a very empathic researcher and show a lot of care, without influencing people’s responses. When researchers are tempted to just move right on, I find it’s more because they don’t know what to say and are uncomfortable. One good practice is to role play the types of things that you might hear as a researcher with a team-mate. Consider some scenarios and practice saying out loud what your responses could be. I’ve done this before and it’s also fun!
Creating a process of ‘what could come up’ in relation to your project is also a great exercise to get managers involved in, as it shows the potential for traumatic stories and disclosures to pop up in any project, whether you’re working on government services, mobile banking, healthcare or anything else. These exercises can raise awareness in organisations about the types of things researchers are potentially going to have to encounter and manage, and highlights the requirement for more understanding, investment and training for user researchers.
Q8. When embarking on this journey to create trauma-informed design at Chayn, what are some top challenges that you have faced?
There was never an intentional starting point for this journey as Chayn started as a community-driven initiative — it was a case of learning as we go. One of the early things we did was create warm spaces both online and offline and we instantly noticed a difference in how survivors relate to us vs other organisations— it was one of our first lightbulb moments.
Along the way, we created a trail of these light bulb moments and started organising them . Over time, through much exploration as a team and with our wider community of practitioners, activists, researchers, and survivors, they became our principles. We studied trauma-informed principles being used in practice and did some deep learning about trauma — particularly focused on intergenerational trauma, and the type of trauma that arises from experiencing abuse. Hera wrote about the journey to defining our principles in a blog post in 2021. Read the blog.
In the past few years since we’ve become a staffed team, the challenge has been in operationalising these principles into all aspects of our work and reminding ourselves to think and work through them rather than only looking at them at design stage. This is in progress — getting it so entrenched in the DNA of the organisation that irrespective of changes in staff and contractors — it becomes the prism through which all work is done.
Q9. The power sharing one is a tricky one, because of the balance that was being discussed earlier, between getting people involved but without potentially “using” them in an extractive way. How can we know the balance is right? It’s a bit in the eye of the beholder, isn’t it? Because people can be taking part voluntarily and might be feeling comfortable doing so (or saying so) but especially when people are vulnerable it may not be as clear cut.
Yes, this is hard. One key thing that we do is to ensure that there’s enough time in research sessions for the person to talk with us and feel heard, before we get into focusing on UX questions. We try to make research feel like a mutual sharing and connecting space — whilst acknowledging our limitations. We are not therapists so it would be unsafe to invite participants to tell us about their traumas — we’re careful not to ask them to. There are many survivors though, who appreciate a warm and reassuring conversation, and we feel able to create that.
One thing you can do is ask research participants for feedback following sessions, or follow up with them over email to ask how it felt for them. Here you’ll gather some feedback about whether you have got the balance right — and you will probably intuitively know too. Being brave enough to share with your colleagues whether research feels right, or needs addressing tonally/methodologically, is something we’d strongly encourage.
You may find yourself with a participant who wants to contribute but who is not in a position to do so meaningfully for your project. Rather than being frustrated at a ‘wasted’ session for your work, think about what signs and signals may have been present, that you can learn from for next time. Instead of panicking and just extracting as much as you can, acknowledge that maybe this session is more meant for them to feel heard. You’re still learning about survivor needs by letting them take up that space.
Q10. What if someone doesn’t feel safe joining from their house, how can we provide a safe space if we don’t [have] a physical office?
Given we are a fully remote organisation, we also don’t have an office that we can invite people to. Even if we did, we probably would not rely on it much as all of our research is international. We encourage participants to choose a time and space that’s more likely to feel safe for them to talk, and try to offer lots of options to accommodate this. We have lots of participants who join research from work, or from their car for example, or later at night when their kids are asleep. We try not to encourage participants to join research if they are currently concerned for their safety; that’s because it’s not appropriate for us to be running UX research with people when they’re in this situation; they’re most vulnerable to being triggered. Because we are not a crisis response organisation, people in this stage of their healing journey are not our core users, and so it’s also not organisationally important for us to centre those voices.
In terms of psychological safety, we also let participants know that there are options to take part, whether it’s completing a task in their own time, using the chat feature on zoom instead of talking, speaking with video off or having a full video call. We are always experimenting with this and keen to create more options as we grow.
Q11. Have you ever done any research with survivors with learning disabilities?
We don’t actively screen for participants with learning disabilities at the moment, but many of our participants do voluntarily share in our recruitment process that they have learning and processing challenges such as ADHD, or commonly feeling overwhelmed and struggling to focus, alongside anxiety and PTSD.
A trauma-informed researcher would naturally expect and cater to these things — because regardless of whether they’re a more permanent pattern in someone’s neurobiology, there are clear overlaps with how trauma-responses affect brain functioning. If we are choosing between two participants, we will often decide to include the person who describes these traits and experiences over someone who doesn’t, because doing so helps us to design services that are equitable.
At Chayn we do get a strongly positive feedback from participants for offering our course materials in multiple formats that support different learning or information processing styles, and we’re always trying to make participating in research feel safe for neurodiverse people too. For example, we spend time giving very clear ideas of what the research will entail, and we try to be generous with giving options for taking part without overwhelming the person with choices to make. We also limit research activities that require the participant to do a lot of reading within a timed window.
Q12. How do you research from a trauma-informed perspective towards the researcher? Do you check on each other or is there a way you can spot when a colleague is triggered from being in contact with survivors?
Good question. The Chayn team is pretty well versed in vicarious trauma, but even so, it shows up in different ways for different people so it’s vital to check in. We could do more about sharing the signs with each other, and I am going to add this to my user manual under ‘What it looks like when I’m not coping so well’.
We advocate for lots of rest around interviews so that we can emotionally process, before we start doing analysis. We always try to join interviews in pairs, and have an emotional debrief as well as a content debrief, following sessions.
We also have access to a trauma-informed therapist who can help us work through tough feelings that come up as part of our research work. If you want to know more about Vicarious Trauma and keeping ourselves safe, I highly recommend you listen to Laura Van Dernoot Lipsky on the Being Well podcast.
That’s it for now. There are some links below for further reading, and you can comment here or send feedback to jenny@chayn.co if you like.
February’s TID Workshop slides
February’s TID Workshop video recording
Blog series on applying Chayn’s Trauma-informed Design principles in User Research at Chayn
