The Central Statistics Office (CSO) is committed to providing an excellent public service through user-centred design. Our aim is to meet the needs of our service users by developing customer-focused products and channels.
To achieve this, we are conducting user research to hear directly from our users about your needs.
As part of our work to improve user experience across CSO websites and platforms, we are conducting a programme of user research studies. We are also establishing a CSO User Research Panel which gives our service users the opportunity to be part of our user research programme.
In 2025, we conducted a Customer Satisfaction Survey which was promoted through our websites, email mailing lists and social media channels.
More than 500 people took part and we received excellent feedback on areas of strength as well as areas in need of improvement.
Some key points:
We want to continue learning from our users about how they interact with the CSO.
We are formalising our user research activities to reach all the different types of users of CSO products and services to better understand their needs.
This year we are running user research studies to understand what changes are needed on our websites. We want to hear directly from you about what works and what needs to improve. This may take the form of user surveys or usability studies to help us understand how people use and interact with our websites.
If you would like to get involved and help the CSO to improve our products and services, please see our current activities (below) for ways to take part.
You can also get involved by joining our CSO User Research Panel.
To help us connect with CSO service users interested in participating in user research, we are setting up a User Research Panel. The panel operates on an opt-in basis and you can opt-out at any time. We will ask you for some personal details to enable us to contact you and to help us match you with research studies relevant to how you interact with the CSO.
If you'd like to join the User Research Panel, a sign up form is available on request. Please email UserResearch@cso.ie to request the link to the form.
This short survey focuses on how you use our websites. It has about 10 easy multiple-choice questions and should take around 5 minutes to complete. This survey is being conducted by Arekibo Communications on behalf of the CSO.
Take the CSO websites user survey: https://forms.office.com/e/K0KtcyZbpB
We are inviting a number of CSO users to take part in a usability study to help us improve our websites. This study is being conducted by Arekibo Communications on behalf of the CSO. The study involves moderated sessions where users are asked to complete a number of small tasks on our websites while sharing their thoughts.
A limited number of sessions are being run and the CSO is issuing invitations by email.
Our commitment to safeguarding data confidentiality is a core principle of our work, and this extends to our User Research studies.
A Data Protection Transparency Notice for CSO Research is available to view and will be updated periodically to cover new activities.
Individual usability studies will request additional direct consent as required.