DfE internal research working group
The internal research working group
In 2025, a group of Department for Education user researchers formed a working group to find better ways to approach internal user research. The group is made up of user researchers who have done internal research or are currently doing internal research. Our goal was to create solutions that the user research community can use to help them overcome challenges with conducting internal research.
Internal user research is when you use user research methods to gather insights from participants who work within your organisation.
Why is internal user research different?
Internal user research can feel different from doing research with users outside your organisation. Researchers say they experience new challenges when doing this type of research.
In our working group, we identified that:
- internal and external research is different, and how researchers approach internal research should consider this
- user researchers often feel unsure about how to approach internal research
- the DfE community have lots of guidance and support for conducting external research, but there is much less for internal research
- existing guidance doesn’t address all the challenges that come with internal research
To reflect this, we created the following problem statement:
When speaking with internal users, there is a tension between two important but sometimes competing principles:
- we need to uphold ethical research principles, which may be at greater risk when researching internally
- we want to avoid creating additional or unnecessary barriers for entry for business-as-usual conversations.
It is difficult to balance these two principles.
The challenges of doing internal user research
We ran workshops to outline all the challenges we had experienced and themed them into 7 categories. The working group created statements of the seven key areas:
1. What is internal user research
It is not always clear if user research is the right method to carry out research with internal users, who may also be stakeholders.
How might we distinguish between user research and other business-as-usual activities, to make sure we use everyone’s time effectively, ethically, and efficiently.
2. Anonymity
Teams and roles can be easier to identify, increasing the risk of not being able to maintain anonymity of participants.
How might we help stakeholders understand why anonymity is important, in a space where people can be easily identified.
3. Informed consent
Internal users who are unfamiliar with research can find the consent forms too formal and daunting, leading to them not engaging with research. On the flipside, those familiar with research can sometimes be found not engaging with consent practices as they feel they already know the process, so may miss information about the research and how their data will be used.
How might we improve the way we gather consent, to reduce intimidation and reluctance among internal user research participants.
4. Coercion
There is a risk of participants experiencing pressure to take part in user research. This could be through perceived benefits of taking part, like evidence for their performance reviews, or through pressure from leadership to take part.
How might we reduce pressure and complexity to support ethical, voluntary research recruitment.
5. Research fatigue
If there is a lot of research being conducted internally with small user groups, there is an increased risk of participant fatigue.
How might we reduce over-reliance on the same populations, to reduce participant fatigue, and improve research quality.
6. Participant recruitment
Due to pre-determined organisation cultures and communication channels, it can be difficult to know the best way to communicate with potential participants for research recruitment.
How might we follow ethical user research recruitment protocol and best practice, appreciate the norms and existing communication channels, while still conducting ethical user research recruitment.
7. Appropriate methods
Research approaches and methods can feel formal and time consuming to internal users.
How might we be flexible in our approach to selecting research methods, enabling us to adapt our methods to internal audiences, whilst maintaining credibility.
How we plan to use the 7 challenges to inform our working group approach
The 7 'how might we' statements enable us to ideate around each problem and statement and how we may create resources that will help the reach community, overcome or reduce the impact of each problem, including considering things like:
- creating a decision tree to help people understand if what they are doing with internal research is user research, or more business as usual activities
- updating internal user research consent forms
- creating checklists for conducting internal user research
How to get involved
We are keen to hear about other experiences of internal user research across government, and how other research teams overcome the challenges of internal user research. To get more information or to get involved, email us: sarah.odonnell@education.gov.uk; Anastasia.SOKOLOV@education.gov.uk
Thank you
We would like to thank all our past and present members: Adam Dumbell, Katy Foster, Paul Kent, Emily Warner, Ellie Wood, Muawiyah Manley, Giulia Cavallo, Reni Sonde, Claire Bryan, Joe Pettit, Rosalie Lord, Rae Welch, Helen Doyle, Stephanie Ellis, Janice O’Toole, Lucy Upot, Fiona Kane, Hayat Ali, Sonia Wilson, Lucy Sutton, Sarah O’Donnell (working group co-lead), Anastasia Sokolov (working group co-lead).
We also thank Claire Jones for her helpful content design contributions, and Tom Adams, head of user research at DfE, and Lucy Sutton, Research Operations for their helpful guidance throughout the process.
Leave a comment