Beyond Personas: Honoring the Humanity in Research Operations
by Marionne Cagandahan-Obenauer
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Participating in user research can sometimes be uneasy or even downright nerve-wracking. Whether it’s baring their soul in an interview or fumbling with a confusing interface, research participants are often asked to be vulnerable and honest in front of strangers. Sometimes they’re asked to describe a highly personal experience, which makes the process even more delicate. Imagine sharing your innermost thoughts about a sensitive topic, like financial hardship or mental health. How would you feel? And how would you want to be treated?
According to a study called “Emotional Risks to Respondents in Survey Research: Some Empirical Evidence,”1 individuals asked to report on emotionally distressing topics can experience psychological risks such as anxiety, shame, or an altered sense of self. This study reminds us that what might seem like a routine study to a researcher can have a profound and lasting impact on the participant. Earlier this year, a UX researcher friend told me, “We need to remember that for [research participants], it’s not just ‘research.’ It’s their life, their experiences, their feelings.”
Even seemingly low-risk usability studies can evoke unintended emotional reactions. As someone who manages teams recruiting thousands of participants, I’ve observed countless research sessions, and I’ve seen firsthand how participants can internalize design flaws and feel like it’s their failing if they don’t understand the design or what to do next. They might leave feeling inadequate or frustrated, which can impact their confidence—not to mention their perception of your brand. Sometimes, we even hear participants apologize after the session. Aguayo, a boutique firm specializing in user experience design and technology consulting, talked about this in their article, “Identification of Emotions: Forge Deeper Connections with Users through Emotion-Driven UX.”2 In it, they emphasized that “Emotions are a fundamental aspect of the human experience, and they play a pivotal role in our daily lives. When it comes to digital interactions, emotions can be the driving force behind user engagement, loyalty, and satisfaction.” This thesis confirms that, like any other action we take as humans, there’s an emotion attached to every digital and interpersonal engagement, and there’s always a risk that these emotions may be processed negatively. Sensitive topics, such as financial struggles or health challenges, can amplify these risks, making the need for thoughtful participant recruitment processes critical.
Implementing Empathy as a Strategy: A Little Goes a Long Way
So, what can we do to ease this emotional weight? We can start by going beyond the usual ethical checklist of consent forms, NDAs, and privacy clauses and create an environment of psychological safety throughout the research process. The UK’s Department for Education’s User Research Manual suggests the following:
Screen for Emotional Risk. Carefully consider the potential emotional impact of your study and, during the participant recruitment process, exclude high-risk individuals from participating while making sure you’re not unfairly excluding marginalized voices in the process. As part of screening, ask open-ended questions about participants’ comfort levels discussing the topic, and discuss in advance what participation entails. For accessibility participants, inquire about accommodations that would facilitate comfortable participation.
Train Moderators in Empathy. Equip your team with the skills needed to recognize signs of distress (e.g., hesitation or agitation) and respond with compassion. Sometimes, a simple acknowledgement of a participant’s feelings can make all the difference.
Allocate Time for Debriefing. Verbally acknowledge and validate participants’ experiences and any challenges they faced during the research activities. You can prepare scripts or talk tracks to clearly communicate and affirm that any difficulties encountered are due to design issues, not the participant’s abilities.
By prioritizing participant emotional well-being, we can create research experiences that aren’t only ethical but are also more meaningful for everyone involved.
Building Relationships, Not Databases
Long-term studies teach us a powerful lesson: participants are not renewable resources. If all we do is keep returning to a group of participants without regard for their fatigue or trust in the system, we’ll erode both the quality of their feedback and the relationship. Think of your research participants as members of your community—you can’t build a strong community by treating people like they’re disposable.
And trust isn’t built overnight. It requires consistent care, open communication, and a genuine commitment to honoring participants’ time and contributions. In an article titled, “What Is Prolonged Engagement?”, qualitative software company, Qdacity, emphasized: “Prolonged engagement enables researchers to establish rapport and build trust with participants. By spending substantial time in the field, researchers can create meaningful connections and foster a comfortable environment for open and honest communication. This trust facilitates participants’ willingness to share personal experiences and perspectives, resulting in rich, in-depth data.”3
This principle is crucial for UX research (and research operations) because when participants trust us, they move beyond surface-level responses to share genuine frustrations, unfiltered reactions, and vulnerable moments of confusion—the exact insights that lead to meaningful design improvements.
In “Designing for Trust: The Crucial Role in Digital User Experiences,”4 Experience Design & Innovation Executive Vandhana Bhaskaran wrote that, “trust is a cumulative outcome of consistent and reliable experiences across the user journey.” She stressed the importance of creating a cohesive narrative across multiple touchpoints to foster trust over time, rather than focusing on isolated interactions. To move beyond superficial interactions and cultivate authentic relationships, here are some tried-and-true strategies:
Track Engagement History. Maintain detailed records of how often participants are involved in studies. If this can be integrated into your participant management tool, all the better! This will help you prevent burnout, ensure fresh perspectives without overburdening the same individuals (and avoid sending them too much compensation in the form of thank-you gifts, which can lead to tax complications for everyone).
Humanize Follow-Ups. Don’t just send a generic thank-you note to a participant. Rather, share how their contributions have specifically shaped product decisions. For example, “Your feedback helped us simplify our checkout process for millions of users!” This shows them that their voice truly counts.
Make Consistency a Priority. Whenever possible, assign the same researcher or recruiter to interact with recurring participants. You can also leverage relationships within the organisation if you’re working with partners or suppliers. This helps build rapport and fosters a sense of familiarity, which can make all the difference.
As Kate Towsey detailed in her book, Research That Scales (Rosenfeld, 2024), “before getting lost in the minutia of scaling participant recruitment, knowledge management, or research ethics, to name just a few of the jobs of research operations, it is essential to exchange the jargon, trends, and clichés…for a pragmatic and comprehensive understanding of what these business words mean—really mean—both broadly and in the context of research.”5
Putting robust systems in place for recruitment, engagement tracking, and documentation isn’t about bureaucracy or checking boxes; it’s the practical foundation for building trust and sustaining participant wellbeing at scale. Thoughtful, operationally sound frameworks enable UX practitioners to move beyond ad hoc encounters to truly respectful, long-term relationships with the people behind your data.
Identifying Who’s Missing: The Problem with Exclusionary Practices
Despite best intentions, typical recruitment processes often exclude individuals with disabilities or those from underrepresented communities. Inaccessible forms, rigid session formats, and a lack of accessibility accommodations, such as screen readers and keyboard-only navigation, send a clear (and often unintended) message: “It’s okay if we don’t hear about you—or from you.”
It’s time we actively address and reconstruct this message.
Accessibility consultant Amber Qualm of the A11y Collective highlights the importance of keeping accessibility practices in mind. She emphasizes that accessibility is critical from the start of the UX process, not just as an afterthought. Ensuring accessibility in signup forms and research sessions allows people with disabilities to participate, fostering inclusivity and improving the usability of products for all users. In “How to Integrate Accessibility into UX Research,” Amber wrote, “Use the WCAG-EM methodology to check your work against accessibility guidelines. While automated tools like WAVE or axe can help spot basic issues, they’re just the starting point—not the whole story.”6
To create a truly inclusive research environment, you must start with a commitment to accessibility and a willingness to adapt processes to meet the needs of all participants. Here are some actionable next steps you can take:
Design Accessible Invitations. Use plain language, captioned videos, and flexible scheduling options to make participation easier for everyone. As much as possible, consider offering multiple communication channels (e.g., phone, email, video call) to accommodate different preferences and needs.
Normalize Accommodations: Don’t wait for participants to ask for help. Proactively offer adjustments, such as quiet rooms, extended session times, or remote participation options.
Partner with Advocacy Groups: Collaborate with organizations to reach diverse populations. These groups can provide valuable insights and help you connect with participants who might otherwise be overlooked. Here are some examples:
It’s also worth finding other country-specific accessibility groups relevant to your work, as well as local disability advocacy groups that represent specific disability communities. Know-the-ada.com offers a comprehensive directory of 25 Essential ADA Advocacy Groups you can reference.
Closing the Loop: Feedback as Respect
Imagine pouring your heart and soul into a creative project, only to have it disappear into the void without a single word of acknowledgement. Frustrating, right? That’s often how participants feel after contributing to user research. They generously share their time, thoughts, and experiences, but rarely hear how their input made a difference. As a result, many feel undervalued and disengaged from future participation opportunities.
Inclusion is foundational to ethical research, but ethics extend beyond recruitment. They also encompass how we close the loop with participants after studies conclude. Just as Kate Towsey wrote in Research That Scales:
“You should do more than simply lay out behavioral ideals in a code of conduct or give participants a form to sign. Instead, you should aim to make ethical and compliant practices part and parcel of how the research team rolls…The goal is not just to tick regulatory and ethical boxes, it’s also to empower researchers to do their best work, and participants and observers to take part, in ways that feel good for everybody.”
A 2024 study released by Aguayo’s editorial team found that participants who received updates about how their feedback influenced decisions were 63 percent more likely to participate in future research. Simple gestures like sharing product updates, thanking them personally, and sending a personalized thank-you email or gift can go a long way toward building goodwill.
This is not only ethical but is proven to be beneficial. An article by Mathew Sunil George, PhD et al, clearly discussed this: “sharing results can also increase participants’ sense of ownership of research outcomes, improve trust between researchers and participants and encourage participation in future research. Studies have also shown that participants consider receiving research results as a right.”7
Ready to show your participants that their contributions matter? Here are some suggestions about how you can create meaningful feedback loops that foster connection and build goodwill:
Share Product Updates. Use email templates to share anonymized findings and explain how participant insights were used to shape product decisions. Be as specific and as transparent as you’re authorized to be.
Celebrate Contributions Publicly. With obtained participant consent, you can highlight specific changes inspired by their feedback in newsletters, blog posts, or product announcements, where possible—giving credit where credit is due builds trust and reinforces the value of their participation. At Booking.com, we’ve also infused traveller and partner panels into live intra-company events, ensuring we’re able to plug customer centricity to the widest audience.
Say Thank You Genuinely: Go the extra mile and create a personalized thank-you note, whether in email or in person. Personalized notes acknowledging a participant’s unique contributions make a great impact toward making someone feel seen and appreciated.
Making It Real: Creating Effective Feedback Loops
My fellow UX practitioners, we are more than just data gatherers. We are the guardians of human experience, especially during this AI boom! It’s time we remember to look beyond the personas and see the person, too. Whether it’s the parent juggling childcare during an interview, the student navigating accessibility barriers, or the survivor sharing their story in hopes of making a difference.
As researchers and recruiters, let’s acknowledge that categorizing people, using demographics, behavioral archetypes, or other labels, is often necessary to make sense of data and enable recruitment systems to function effectively. But when we treat the entirety of a person through the lens of simple labels—reducing individuals solely to corresponding categories for analysis’ sake—we risk obscuring not only their essential humanity but also the invaluable, nuanced insights hidden beneath seemingly surface-level interactions. The challenge, then, is to consciously build empathy and respect into these necessary systems—to proactively ensure our operational frameworks don’t strip away the human connection that yields both ethical practice and a richer understanding.
By embracing empathy, prioritizing psychological safety, and building authentic relationships, we can transform user research into more than a transactional exchange. This not only serves as a force for good but fundamentally shifts and improves how we source high-quality research participants—the ultimate driver of meaningful research outcomes. More than just the right thing to do, treating individuals ethically and respectfully is a strategic advantage. It unlocks the potential for transformative insights, cultivates high-performing, collaborative teams, and builds a truly customer-centric and successful business. It elevates our practice.
So, I challenge you to measure success not only by the number of sessions conducted or by how well the recruited participants align with the stratified criteria, but also by the positive impact our products have on the lives of the people who share their stories with us.
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Edited by Kate Towsey and Katel LeDu.
Labott, Susan M., Timothy P. Johnson, Michael Fendrich, and Norah C. Feeny. “Emotional Risks to Respondents in Survey Research: Some Empirical Evidence.” JERHRE 8, no. 4 (2013): 53-66. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3996452/.
“Identification of Emotions: Forge Deeper Connections with Users through Emotion-Driven UX.” Aguayo. Accessed November 11, 2025. https://aguayo.co/en/blog-aguayo-user-experience/identification-emotions-forge-deeper-connections-users-emotion-driven-ux/.
“What Is Prolonged Engagement? How to Use Prolonged Engagement to Improve the Rigor of Your Qualitative Research.” QDAcity. https://qdacity.com/prolonged-engagement/.
Bhaskaran, Vandhana. “Designing for Trust: The Crucial Role in Digital User Experiences.” Journal of User Experience 19, no. 2: 53-59. https://uxpajournal.org/designing-for-trust-the-crucial-role-in-digital-user-experiences/.
Towsey, Kate. 2024. Research That Scales: The Research Operations Handbook. Rosenfeld Media. https://rosenfeldmedia.com/books/research-that-scales/.
Qualm, Amber. “How to Integrate Accessibility into UX Research.” A11Y Collective. December 16, 2024. https://www.a11y-collective.com/blog/accessibility-ux-research/.
Mathew Sunil, George, Gaitonde Rakhal, Davey Rachel, Mohanty Itismita, and Upton Penney. “Engaging Participants with Research Findings: A Rights-informed Approach.” Health Expect, (2023). https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10010096/.
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Regarding the topic of the article, this peice is so insightful about honoring participant vulnerability. It makes me wonder, how do ResearchOps teams trully de-risk that feeling of failure when a user struggles with a design? Beyond a polite disclaimer, what are some practical, humane strategies you've seen work?