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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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, introduced by Alan Cooper, are a technique of goal-directed design that is meant to help designers gain clarity and provide focus during the design process. They describe the goals and activities of archetypal users in a 1-2 page description based on a few ethnographic interviews with real users. Aside from the fact that personas are a current design trend, what makes personas interesting? Certainly they are seductive to design teams since they can be quick to create if they only require a few (2-3) interviews and a good writer. But good designers and managers know that reliable requirements gathering and design that meets the needs of the business, the market, and the user is not so simply constructed. So something else must be going on.

  • 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.

  • 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.

Interviews