Testing the effects of medications or other kinds of health related treatments requires prior approval of the study protocol by an institutional review board (IRB) at your institution.

The IRB is supposed to review the study protocol and make sure that the potential benefits of the research outweigh the risks, if any.

However, whether or not a review of this type needs to be done for studies that don't involve medications or any kind of physical intervention is unclear.

For example, is IRB review required for a study that evaluates a user interface design?

To find out if the design is working properly, we need to observe people using it. The risk of someone being harmed is low, but a person who helps us test-run something that turns out to be a bad design might experience some discomfort.

We need to investigate this before we move too far ahead in testing new designs for IGB and our software. So for this task, please do some research to find out what other groups at UNC Charlotte are doing with respect to study designs and making sure their design testing protocols are sound.