Experiential Design
Interviews
The experience the audience has with compliance materials will impact, in part, their acceptance of compliance initiatives, changes to policies and procedures, auditing and monitoring, as well as feedback from audit findings. Although it is possible and even likely that the audience will not be able to articulate what they want, or even be able to foresee the ways design can help make the compliance aspects of their jobs easier to learn, it is still important to interview people as to their personal experience with the compliance materials.
Government Officials
In the case of governmental officials and accreditation officers, it is important to listen carefully to feedback from agency representatives and pinpoint what information the agency representatives had trouble finding during site visits so that documentation or policies and procedures may be better organized for subsequent site visits. It is also important to maintain a database of all prior letters from government agencies, such as from the Office for Human Research Protections and the Food and Drug Administration to ensure that all prior findings are audited, monitored, continuously addressed, and that corrective actions required by agencies are featured prominently in policies and procedures, as well as within internal audit documentation.
Preparing for Interviews
In preparing for interviews with people who will use the compliance materials, tools, or programs, it is important to review the audit results of the existing compliance program based on a large sample size to know what the existing compliance issues are and to try to create an analysis that starts from first principles to help determine during the interviews the possible reasons as to why compliance is not currently being achieved in the identified areas. Compliance issues should be organized according to the level of risk to reputation, financial risk, and risk to government funding sources and, if applicable, accreditation. The goal during interviews is to determine why people function the way they do to find design solutions based on the information gathered in interviews and through observation.
