Q&A with 2024 Groundbreaking Research Project award finalists Meta and PA Consulting
Editor’s note: Meta and PA Consulting are a finalist of the 2024 Groundbreaking Research Project award, a category in the Marketing Research and Insight Excellence Awards. The winners of the awards will be announced on November 19 during a virtual celebration. To find out more about the awards, visit QuirksAwards.com.
Mesta and PA Consulting are a finalist in the 2024 Marketing Research and Insight Excellence Awards’ Groundbreaking Research Project category. The two organizations teamed up to learn what impact mixed reality (MR) and augmented reality (AR) could have on individuals with accessibility needs.
Blending in-home ethnography with a large-scale survey and needs-based segmentation, Meta and PA Consulting redefined the best practices of accessible research. The teams also used innovative recruitment and participation techniques, customizable participant experience with accessibility experts embedded throughout the process.
“This isn’t just a story about the research's transformative impact. It's about a trust-building, inclusive research design that ensures underrepresented voices are accommodated and amplified, resulting in stronger outcomes for inclusive technology development,” the teams at Meta and PA Consulting said.
Hear more about this “groundbreaking research project” in this Q&A with the Meta and PA Consulting teams.
Describe the nominated project
MR and AR hold unparalleled potential to create a more expansive, inclusive future for everyone. For people living with accessibility needs or disabilities, these technologies could be life changing.
Imagine: Smart glasses reading aloud scenes and signs in a supermarket for someone who is blind, providing greater access to the world around them. For someone who is uncomfortable leaving home, an MR headset can bring the ancient Mayan ruins directly to them.
Meta Reality Labs, home of Meta Quest and Meta Rayban Stories (smart glasses), want to make this possibility a reality through innovative feature development, ensuring their emerging tech products offer a truly equitable experience.
In partnership with PA Consulting, Meta launched ambitious research to understand the diverse and intersectional needs within the disability community and the impact on tech experiences through in-home ethnographic exploration and large-scale survey with needs-based segmentation.
Pivotal to the approach was an innovative recruitment strategy through activist, community and charity outreach and flexible response methods spanning guided, telephone and paired carer interviews. All co-developed with subject-matter experts and people with lived experience of disability. This ensured inclusion of nearly 1,700 people living with diverse accessibility needs and set new standards for accessible research within Meta.
For the research industry, the project is a showcase of how a trust-building, inclusive design can ensure underrepresented voices are amplified, resulting in stronger outcomes for accessible research.
For Meta, the research has had a transformative impact, leading to the development of several new MR and AR accessibility features, the launch of organization-wide universal design principles and the acceleration of the development of an accessible product ecosystem.
What was the most challenging aspect of this project?
This project faced several challenges, primarily because traditional research processes do not prioritize accessibility and inclusivity in the design and execution.
Our research needed to reach people with diverse and intersectional accessibility needs and provide an equitable and enjoyable research experience – at scale. This was vital in order to quantify the total addressable market. The potential impact of individual product features and direct what features Meta should develop next to better serve the disability community.
Our approach, therefore, needed to go beyond traditional quantitative recruitment methods and offer flexible response options tailored to individual needs, in a sensitive manner.
Building connections and taking time to build trust with disability activists, their community and supporting charities was vital to the approach. We consulted with over 30 disability charities, inviting them to critique our approach and engage their networks.
Collaborating with disability activists on social media, accessibility forums, Reddit and Discord provided authentic engagement, enabling us to “snowball” recruitment efforts by creating shareable links to engage their own communities. This opened the research to those who would not have been reachable by traditional methods.
Building flexible response methods – with the input of accessibility experts and those with lived experience of disability – was vital to ensure that our approach wasn’t “one-size-fits-all” and offered a more tailored, equitable respondent experience. Offering non-digital means of survey participation, telephone-aided surveys, guided surveys and video surveys, was essential to ensuring everyone who wanted to take part could do so.
Furthermore, the digital research experience was individually customizable. Respondents had a choice of font size, language and screen reader usage. All text passages were offered in AI-generated audio to listen rather than read and offered a functionality to pause and resume at any time, providing flexibility to complete at their own pace.
Would you change anything about the project?
Ensuring an accessible research experience was a primary consideration for this project, and it required significant time and effort to build an equitable research environment. This involved feedback, refinement and iteration at every stage of the research process – from consulting with accessibility experts and people with lived experience of disability, fine tuning the screen reader experience, iterating from live respondent feedback and engaging charities and disability networks through multiple channels.
As a result, this project took longer than a typical research project. This was essential to ensuring a truly accessible experience, and the insights gained have been invaluable to Meta’s ongoing product development. We recognize, though, that time may become a limiting factor when applying these accessible research practices to other types of projects.
More broadly, we recognize that disability is just one facet of inclusivity. In this project we actively amplified the voices of minority ethnic groups within our sample to introduce a more intersectional approach, but we understand that many other aspects of identity may shape people’s diverse needs and experiences.
This project marks an important step in our commitment to making accessible, best-practice research a standard for all studies. Our long-term vision is to ensure that everyone, regardless of their accessibility needs or background, has the opportunity to participate in our research. This initiative lays the groundwork for our future action plan as we continue to evolve and refine our methodologies and processes.