Lalich Center website: exploratory research
UX Research Case Study
A website committed to supporting cult survivors in their recovery journey.
Project details
My role: UX Researcher (in collaboration with design, product and writing teams)
Type of Design: Exploratory research in creating a minimum viable product in first phase
Purpose (context): The Lalich Center was seeking to establish https://lalichcenter.org/ to create an online presence to complement their non-profit status and aid in their growth. The Lalich Center is one of the thought leaders in supporting cult survivors in their recovery journey through professional mental health services, community-based services and workshops.
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Objective: The Lalich Center needed a website that hosted relevant resources and brought awareness of their brand for cult survivors.
Duration: 3 months
Tools and Methods: Figma, Competitive analysis, User interviews
Research Goals
Our goals from the research were to better the cult survivor’s journey to the Lalich Center and to provide impactful and relevant resources.
Research questions:
1) What facilitates/signifies trust on a website that addresses issues of cults and coercive relationships?
2) What services are helpful and unhelpful for this community?
3) How do we build awareness and involvement about cults and coercive relationships with the wider community?
Competitor analysis
We conducted a competitor analysis of existing organizations providing similar services as the Lalich Center. We reviewed their target clients, mission, strengths and weaknesses of their website.
User interviews
Participant criteria:
Familiarity with the Lalich Center and their services
Comfortable in sharing about their experience seeking recovery services after leaving the cult
18+ (as much age demographic as possible)
Sought out/seeking services for help on their own
*The Lalich Center helped us recruit survivors and professionals for interviewing. We interviewed 6 user interviews with cult survivors through Zoom.
Key insights & recommendations
We analyzed the interviews through affinity mapping in Figma. We surfaced the following insights and recommendations from these themes below.
For Survivors:
Tone and language
Don’ts: No therapy jargon, over-imposing language, new age terminology
Do’s: Safe, trustworthy, provides autonomy and choice, compassionate, credibility in expertise
2. Fees & donations
Provide financial aid options (ex. sliding scale based on need/income), financial buy-in gained from services you pay for and transparency around where their money is going towards.
For those who navigated coercion, their finances were often managed and manipulated by someone else and had lack of transparency of their funds. One of the pillars of a trustworthy website is making sure people knew what their money is paying for which services and willing to work with your financial situation as people could be starting with a clean slate in their recovery journey.
3. Emotional support needs
Don’ts: Disorganized structure of events which can lead to unmoderated comments and actions, promoting status hierarchy through means of power and knowledge
Do’s: Safe social connections that perhaps facilitate similar exchange of experiences, strategies to reconnecting with families and friends, moderated group discussions
Workshops that have structure and moderation to mitigate conversations from being unhelpful. Workshops and courses should be led by trusted individuals vetted through the community and not by people who want to misuse their power. Survivors often feel isolated as their relationships with families and friends were neglected so workshops that provide strategies towards mending those relationships would be helpful.
4. Lalich Center services
Vetted participants and leaders, non-extensive course lists to give people the flexibility to opt out, no course pre-requisites, curated course navigation for specific recovery journeys.
Limitations and Reflections
I acknowledge that the sample size was smaller than ideally ~10-15 for interviews for qualitative insights. We were operating within some tight timelines and also knew we were relying on the Lalich Center to recruit people who would be interested in sharing about their journey in discovering the Lalich Center, which may be a smaller group of people.
Earlier conversations with stakeholders about their target audience can instill biases regarding survivors’ needs and pain points. Although eliminating biases isn’t always possible, we incorporated safeguards to reduce bias by having a separate person code one interview they were not involved in moderating alongside the researcher moderating.