ITS Privacy Statement for User Experience Research

ITS engages in user experience research to understand and respond to the IT needs of the UCSC community. User experience research includes administering surveys, collecting feedback, conducting usability testing, interviewing students, faculty and staff, and other research modalities. ITS analyzes user experience research data and may share findings within ITS, with campus stakeholders, and in some cases more broadly.

Participation

Participation in user experience research is voluntary. If you do not wish to participate, there will be no penalty. If you do not participate, it will not affect your university status in any way. If you choose, you may stop your participation at any time. If still images, audio, or video from a session is needed, ITS will explicitly ask for and receive consent prior to recording any research session. A participant may retract consent to be recorded at any point in time during or after the session. You may email the ITS User Experience group to request deletion of a prior recording.

Privacy

Access to data collected during user experience research, including notes and recordings, is limited by permissions only to authorized ITS staff who need to access and manage the particular research data. Third party vendors contracted by the university to manage or store UCSC data have been vetted by ITS, have undertaken a cybersecurity assessment, and their access to any user experience research data is limited to non-identifiable content. Prior to any specific research activity, we will clearly state whether the research is anonymous and/or confidential, why the data is being collected, and who will have access to the data and/or insights.

Surveys

Your survey responses provide data to inform ITS how to best improve digital technology experiences for students and faculty at UCSC. Taking an ITS survey is voluntary. If you choose to participate, you may skip any question you do not wish to answer, with the exception of required questions, usually located at the beginning of the survey.

Most ITS-administered surveys are delivered via Qualtrics or Google Forms, using campus-vetted and licensed software. Unless stated otherwise, IP addresses and other personally identifiable data are not collected in order to maintain participant anonymity. Due to this method of data collection, researchers are unable to remove your survey response should you wish to withdraw it. Unless specifically stated, personally identifying information (known as PII) including email, name, or CruzID, will not be collected, reported, or associated with participant feedback that is shared, whether internally or externally. ITS asks for some demographic information, which helps us understand your role and determine if there might be technology differences across roles at UCSC. Otherwise, all ITS surveys are intended to only address technology-related issues.

Tools security

If user experience research is conducted online, participants will log in to the campus system or website using their UCSC CruzID Gold account to ensure security.

ITS uses Zoom for online meeting sessions, using a campus license.

Data storage

ITS owns and maintains the data collected for ITS user experience research. ITS securely stores any potentially personally identifying research data on authorized secure campus-licensed systems. Individual response data which has any identifying information has that information removed, and are then stored on ITS-administered computers and/or in campus-licensed cloud-based storage systems. The data is stored in accordance with campus data retention policies, and as long as is needed for use in research analysis and benchmarking. Data is password-protected, and is accessible only by authorized individuals.

Contact

For more information, visit ITS User Experience Research or contact the ITS User Experience group at ux@ucsc.edu