Make privacy and consent forms easier to understand [Online talk & workshop]

About This Event

Who likes reading privacy and consent forms? Not many. But when doing research, it is necessary to protect the interests of the participants. The jargon, the difficult sentence structures, and the legalese may seem like a necessary evil. But when you recruit participants for research studies, do these design choices help you find a diverse sample, or do they unwittingly exclude people?

You want a healthy diversity of participants in your research, and it would be a shame if the privacy and consent form is the reason people don’t participate. This is true for Adrianne and Yedida, who both work for the Canadian Digital Service, and conduct research for products and services that impact a wide range of members of the public. In this online session, they will join us from Ontario to present an approach they use to achieve this goal, and walk us through a practical example.

We encourage you to also bring a copy of the privacy and consent form you use in your everyday work, and assess it as we go through the talk.

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Speaker Bios

Participating in a research activity can be an intimidating experience, especially if the researcher is a government employee. Adrianne Lee is a Design Researcher with the Canadian Digital Service at the Government of Canada. As a government employee, her job consists of learning new things everyday to conduct better research and build inclusive services for people across Canada.
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She is interested in interdisciplinary problem solving, conducting research that impacts end-to-end services, and working with others to build meaningful products and services.
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More recently, she’s been gardening with native plants to support local ecosystems and knitting absolutely everything.

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Yedida Zalik is a Content Designer at the Canadian Digital Service (CDS). She worked on the plain language privacy statement. Since joining CDS, she has designed content for several national products, including an inclusive phonetic alphabet that helps deliver information to the public over the phone. She also worked on the design of Canada’s national exposure notification service, COVID Alert.

Before joining CDS, Yedida worked in Ontario legal aid clinics, where she collaborated with communities to design materials for rights information and education.

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Agenda

5:50 pm PDT: Zoom room opens
6.00 pm PDT: Pre-recorded talk starts
6:15 pm PDT: Live Q&A
6:30 pm PDT: (Optional) Online Networking / Workshop