Contextual inquiry and field studies

See also: ethnography

Introductory articles

  • Contextual inquiry
    Contextual inquiry is basically a structured field interviewing method, based on a few core principles that differentiate this method from plain, journalistic interviewing. Contextual inquiry is more a discovery process than an evaluative process; more like learning than testing.
    (James Hom)

  • Contextual enquiry - a primer
    Designers who don't understand their users frequently develop products that are difficult to use and understand, do not meet real-world requirements, or provide irrelevant functionality. The best way to get to know users is to spend time with them, in their own environments, watching them do the things that your Website is going to support or enable.
    (Gerry Gaffney)

  • Site visits
    Site visits are visits to customers with the goal of gathering data on the work practices of users. As soon as possible after the visit, the interview and observation data is collated into simple models of the working practices in interpretation sessions, and then consolidated into comprehensive models. The models form the foundation of the interaction design. This article covers the purpose and conduct of site visits.

  • What is contextual enquiry?
    Contextual enquiry is a technique for examining and understanding users and their workplace, tasks, issues and preferences. It can be used to produce user needs analyses and task analyses, and feeds directly into design.
    (Gerry Gaffney)

Discussion articles

  • Adapting contextual design to a narrowly scoped project
    "When working in 'web-time' it's important to focus on the contextual design techniques that will get the data you need in the brief time frame allowed. Contextual design needs to work in conjunction with other processes used by the organisation."
    (Wendy Fritzke - InContext)

  • Apprenticing with the customer: a collaborative approach to requirements definition
    It is the relationship between designers and customers which determines how well the design team understands the customer problem. This includes not only the overall relationship between design team and customer community, but the individual, minute-by-minute process by which a single designer works with a single customer to understand their work. It is by understanding each person in the context of their work that the team comes to understand the whole work problem.

  • Build it so they will return
    "If you want the users to understand the product, you must first understand the user. If you want the users to understand the product, you must first understand the user. In the effort of pleasing all your users you might have pleased none."
    (Phanita Sudana - InContext)

  • Contextual design in Internet time
    "How can people do a complex requirements definition process in short time frames, with few people? Here are some tips if you find yourself in this situation,"
    (Hugh Beyer - InContext)

  • Contextual design with distributed teams
    "The work of contextual design is done by a team. To be successful, team members must be in ongoing touch with customer data and have a shared understanding. More and more companies are using distributed teams that can't meet face-to-face. We need techniques for making the contextual design work in those environments."
    (Hugh Beyer - InContext)

  • Contextual inquiry v focus groups
    Of all the different marketing techniques that companies use to find out customers' needs, the focus group is one of the most popular. This opens a dialogue, but in reality only identifies hot buttons and sales points. It's important to know hot buttons and sales points, but they do not provide detailed design data.

  • Contextual method for the redesign of existing software products
    This paper is concerned with the problem of improving software products and investigates how to base that process on solid empirical foundations. Our key contribution is a user-centered, contextual method which provides a means of identifying new features, to support the discovered and currently unsupported ways of working, and a means of evaluating the usefulness of proposed features. Standard methods of discovery and evaluation, such as interviews and usability testing, gather some of the necessary data but each individually falls short of covering all important aspects. We overcome the shortcomings of these individual approaches by applying an integrated method for collecting and interpreting data about product usage in context. We demonstrate its effectiveness when applied to the discovery and evaluation of new features for standard web clients.

  • Contextual use cases: using contextual design to define use cases
    "Teams are trying to employ use cases to define the design, but that’s exactly the opposite of how they should be used. Teams who care about customer needs are looking for ways to reconcile customer-centered design with the requirements of corporate-mandated development methodologies. Contextual design has the components you need to satisfy the mandate to do requirements analysis."
    (Hugh Beyer - InContext)

  • Data from a few leads to optimal results
    "There are only so many ways to do work, and they're revealed within a few interviews. Frequency data doesn't show what matters in the work practice. Contextual data uncovers tacit details about work practice, including underlying goals and intents; surveys show generalities and frequencies. Contextual data doesn't show market trends, it models the structure of work practice."
    (Karen Holtzblatt - InContext)

  • Designing from data: the user's voice
    "You need to design what customers think is great, not what you think is great. By understanding the needs of your customers, you won't waste time re-designing. Before I started using contextual design techniques, I always had a nagging feeling that something was missing when I designed."
    (David Rondeau - InContext)

  • Designing mobile applications with customer data
    "The ongoing transformation of the role of mobile devices is leading to more and more discussion about the best way to include the customer in the design process. Do the traditional methods work, or do they need to be transformed as the technology transforms? What is the best way to include the customer in the design process?"
    (Karen Holtzblatt - InContext)

  • Designing to the intent: support your users "whys" not just their "whats"
    Only finding the steps customers take for a task is not enough. Uncovering why steps are taken reveals design requirements. Both the overall intent and underlying subintents need to be supported by your design.

  • Field studies: the best tool to discover user needs
    The most valuable asset of a successful design team is the information they have about their users. When teams have the right information, the job of designing a powerful, intuitive, easy-to-use interface becomes tremendously easier. When they don't, every little design decision becomes a struggle. While techniques, such as focus groups, usability tests, and surveys, can lead to valuable insights, the most powerful tool in the toolbox is the field study. Field studies get the team immersed in the environment of their users and allow them to observe critical details for which there is no other way of discovering.

  • Focus setting: building a strong foundation for your project
    Often teams are excited about using contextual design, and want to jump right in and start interviewing users. This approach is like getting in a taxicab and saying, "I'm not sure where I'm going, but let's drive around for a while and I'll try to figure it out." A design effort is much more effective when the team knows what it's trying to accomplish and which kinds of users are important.

  • Focus setting: getting the right interview mix
    Knowing the type of project you have (tactical or strategic) drives your focus setting decisions. Once your focus is set, you need the right role mix and organisation mix to collect the appropriate amount of customer data. There are guidelines you can follow to help you make good decisions about who and where to interview.
    (Jopyce Vigneau- InContext)

  • Freeing up our creativity
    The success of a design project relies on a team's creativity and ingenuity in developing solutions to real-life customer problems. Contextual design helps us to really understand our users, and offers a balanced design approach that moves between analysis and creativity, and back again. While comfortable with problem solving and analysis, many of us have difficulty switching into visioning, brainstorming, or creative mode. Here are some simple ways to help you quickly engage your creativity when you need it.

  • Good interview data - it's more than just the facts
    "Facts are not the data that matters for design. Interpreting facts with the customer during the interview reveals design needs. Using a chain of reasoning with the customer brings you to a shared understanding of what the facts mean. Offering a hypothesis is more effective than asking open-ended questions."
    (Shelley Wood - InContext)

  • Guerilla contextual design
    "When management doesn't think there's time for contextual design, when your co-workers are afraid it will add more work, when you know that customer data will make your design better--that's the time for guerrilla contextual design."
    (Hugh Beyer - InContext)

  • Helpful tips to improve your contextual inquiry techniques
    "When doing field interviews, it can be easy to fall back into old interview patterns that are not contextual inquiry. There are some triggers you can watch for that signal you are not doing a contextual inquiry interview. There are specific things you can say that will redirect an interview back into a contextual inquiry."
    (Shelley Wood - InContext)

  • How long does customer data stay fresh?
    "Customer data will continue to drive design ideas long after the original project is completed. Building a full set of customer work models is an investment. You want to make it pay. You want to use your resources wisely. Don't get data before you need it, but don't get blindsided by changes in the market."
    (Hugh Beyer - InContext)

  • Innovation or market research?
    "Contextual inquiry is a style of ethnographic inquiry applied specifically to obtain design data. At a superficial glance, it may look the same as interviews used for market research, but it is in fact very different."
    (Alexandra Mack, Karen Holtzblatt - InContext)

  • Keeping a contextual inquiry from becoming a traditional interview
    Sometimes it can be difficult, especially when you are just beginning to do contextual inquiry interviews, to keep the customer interview on track. The interview starts out great: you're in the field, you're with the real user, you're at the user's desk, home, or wherever the real work takes place. But then at some point during the interview you realise things have gone awry. You are asking questions and the user is answering you, but you aren't seeing him or her do their real work practice. I'm willing to bet it's because you didn't pay attention to (or know about) the triggers that signal you've slipped out of contextual inquiry behavior and reverted to traditional interviewing or questionnaire mode.

  • Making customer-centred design work for teams
    Understanding the customer is hard. Design teams need extensive, detailed information about customers and how they work to build systems that support them well. The first requirement on any customer-driven process is to build awareness of the customer into the design team, and continue providing customer feedback throughout the life cycle.

  • Personas and contextual design
    "Personas are currently receiving a lot of attention; is the attention warranted? How can contextual data be used to create personas? How would personas fit with the Contextual Design process?"
    (Karen Holtzblatt - InContext)

  • Putting context into context
    Often when we see usability problems in designs, it's because the design team didn't know something about the context that they should have. Teams with a strong awareness of the different contexts that will crop up are more likely to produce designs that will consistently delight users. Context is made up of a variety of elements. Over the years, we've come up with a basic way to organize these elements so we can think about them more easily.
    (Jared M. Spool)

  • Remote contextual inquiry: a technique to improve enterprise software
    We have recently been working with a research technique that we call 'Remote Contextual Inquiry' to fill the research gap between data collected during remote usability testing and on-site contextual inquiries with end users.

  • Smart automation in everyday life: the public rest room
    "Automation is supposed to make life easier. Or automation is supposed to help fulfill a social value. But at least, automation should delight the user and produce business value. Today, manufacturers are making life "easier" by "doing it for you" in every area of life. Word processors are changing our hte's to the's so quickly that we hardly notice. Car manufacturers are locking our car doors as soon as we start moving. Appliance manufacturers are auto-setting our ovens. And bathroom designers are ensuring that we never have to touch anything in the public bathroom. Automation is intruding into the most intimate areas of our lives--but does it work?"
    (Karen Holzblatt)

  • Stalk your user
    Design, ultimately, is problem solving. And the best way to discover which problems need solving is to look for them in context. Contextual inquiry is an increasingly popular method for discovering design information. Also known as ethnographic research or field studies, the idea is deceptively simple: Build useful products and watch your users as they work. The process itself sounds even easier: Go to where your users are and tag along with them.

  • The evolving role of user researcher
    "The idea of using social scientists to bring special expertise in studying people, culture, and work practice is not new. Design firms are increasingly turning to anthropologists and other social scientists to apply their training in field research to understand people's work practice. More firms now recognise and understand the importance of using ethnographic techniques to study people in their natural settings as a part of design work."
    (Les Holtzblatt - InContext)

  • The hidden value of contextual design
    "You may hope that now your contextual design project is approved, your sales effort is over. After all you're a designer, not a salesperson. But there are a number of reasons why it's important that you keep the lines of communication open. Prove to your senior managers and project stakeholders that they're getting their money’s worth."
    (Shelley Wood - InContext)

  • To envision the future, watch people today
    "Understand how people really work, and you'll figure out what invention could help them. Customers can't tell you what to make, since they don't know the details of what they do."
    (Karen Holtzblatt - InContext)

  • Using contextual design to define use cases
    When you use the development of use cases to drive your discussion of what the system should do and how it should be structured to do it, you mix a conversation about design options, system structure, and UI design with your conversation about the detailed behavior of the system in response to user input. The result is that the use case conversation becomes difficult and contentious--everyone has a different idea about what the system should do, and the conversation about use cases doesn't provide process support for this design discussion.

  • What's an archeologist doing at a design firm?
    "The only way to understand the work you are supporting is to see it. Learning to interview like an anthropologist leads to better customer data and better designs. Looking at work artifacts like an archeologist reveals important work practices."
    (Alexandra Mack - InContext)

  • Why contextual inquiry versus other marketing techniques
    "Different types of 'talk' provide different types of data. Saying 'we talk to our customers' does not necessarily mean you are doing customer-centered design. To get data that is truly useful for product design, you need to use a data collection method created for that purpose."
    (Karen Holtzblatt - InContext)

Interviews