Rainforest Alberta

Understanding how people interpret the core values of an organization

While volunteering with IncluCity Calgary I participated in a project, working with a team to conduct research and usability testing. The client we worked with was Rainforest Alberta, an organization seeking to improve the innovative ecosystem in the province of Alberta.

ROLE

Test facilitator
Test analyst

TIMELINE

October 2022 - January 2023

TOOLS

Google Meet
Miro

TEAM

16 members

PROBLEM

Lack of awareness and clarity of the social contract hinder new members’ abilities to fully embrace the Rainforest Alberta community

Rainforest Alberta brings people together to support the innovation ecosystem in Alberta; new community members join the organization by signing their social contract, which lists out the 10 guiding values of the organization. However, committing to the social contract is not binding, leaving many members unaware of the expectations from the contract itself. Similarly, the contract contains some complex wording that makes it less approachable or clear.

Rainforest Alberta asked our team to help better understand how people interpret the current social contract and find opportunities to improve the clarity of the document and better convey the commitments and expectations of the organization. Along with the social contract, Rainforest Alberta also wanted to explore how to improve the sign-up and engagement process to improve outreach and awareness amongst other organizations and members.

SOLUTION

In the end, we conducted discovery sessions with 21 users to understand people’s perception and comprehension of the social contract.

Through discovery sessions with users of diverse backgrounds, we gathered data on user perception and interpretation of the social contract and the perceived implications. We analyzed the data through sorting and affinity mapping to reveal opportunities for improvement in the word choice and tone of the social contract, both of which influence people’s impressions and motivations. The key qualitative metric was the connotation of user feedback comments with respect to a particular term or section.

My contributions

As a member of the testing team, I facilitated discovery sessions for three users and served as the notetaker for three separate sessions. I collaborated with other team members throughout affinity mapping and qualitative analysis discussions, summarizing key insights and learnings in a presentation to the client.

Research goals

1. Understand how people interpret the current social contract

2. Identify opportunities to improve the social contract by:

Increasing clarity
Achieving commitment to the goals of Rainforest by people who sign-up
Making it easier for organizations to share the social contract and have their members/staff commit to the social contract

Process

Prior to starting testing, I attended workshops held by senior members on test facilitation and notetaking to prepare ourselves for managing discovery sessions. I also read through and provided feedback to the script draft prior to the final version, as well as studied the recording of a sample testing session.

The main components of the discovery session are as follows:

Word list review – users are asked about their thoughts on the ten terms from the social contract that serve as the key values of Rainforest Alberta; in particular, they are asked what each term means to them. At the end of the list, users are asked about their overall impression of the ten values.
Social contract review – users then read through the entire social contract section by section and share their thoughts about each section and the contract as a whole. Afterwards, users are then asked about their expectations, perceptions, and confusions regarding the contract, along with additional thoughts.

Analysis

Prior to data analysis, all qualitative notes were compiled and then organized by the participant and the questions on a spreadsheet to facilitate comparison.

Notable insights from responses were listed out on Miro for affinity mapping, in which we then sorted and grouped them by themes and topics with respect to our research questions to identify trends and clusters. Through these patterns we were able to substantiate recommendations for improving the social contract document and provide some suggestions for the engagement and signup process.

Findings

From our analysis, we gathered key learnings about how people responded to the social contract and provided suggestions for improvement:

Users liked the ideas contained in the contract, but there is room for improvement in words and expressions used

Some terms got negative reactions, created confusion, and were disliked by users.
Clarity of social contract could be improved to help users better understand its main goal along with the associated commitments and expectations

Word choice could be adjusted to improve clarity and soften the overall tone

Certain jargon, expressions, and buzzwords conveyed a negative impression and made the meaning unclear, so they should be swapped out and rephrased with simpler language.
Some parts of the contract were too strongly worded and gave off a forceful and rigid tone.

Manage expectations and emphasize the collective benefits

Some testers expressed interest in signing the social contract, although there were also some that were not interested in signing. Hesitancy seemed to stem from the perception of unrealistic and vague expectations, with feelings of enforcement upon signing.
Testers did reference that social engagement opportunities with Rainforest Alberta could benefit individual and company commitment to the social contract.

Final Thoughts

The project was unique in that unlike my past design and research experiences, we were not testing a product interface, but rather procuring user perceptions of a document. The data analysis process was also the most thorough one that I have been part of, given the sheer amount of data from the participants. Having provided Rainforest Alberta with our proposed improvements to the social contract and signup process, it would be interesting to observe and follow through with the next steps of employing and assessing the changes, as well as further refining outreach efforts.