Contextual Inquiry

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Contextual Inquiry

• learning from users in the field

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Agenda

• Questions?
• Learning from users
• contextual inquiry
• observation
• interview
• overview of other techniques
• field study must-haves

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What is field work?
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Starting field work

• What do you know?
• Domain knowledge
• Assumptions

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Starting field work

• Where not to start
• Marketing data
• Detailed surveys
• Jumping into design
• Asking the customer

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Knowing your user

• Goals are to
• Understand underlying structure / goals / values
• Enable tech transfer
• Make tacit knowledge explicit

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Tacit/Implicit knowledge

• Stuff that you know, but that you dont know you
  know
• Important to reveal as much as possible because
  designs need to support it

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Contextual Inquiry overview

• Field study technique
• Hugh Beyer and Karen Holtzblatt InContext
  Enterprises
• Roots in ethnography from sociology
• Basis of Contextual Design

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Features of Contextual Inquiry

• Conversations/interviews
• Observations
• Takes place in context.
• Focus is on understanding processes while they
  are ongoing

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Translations for projects

• Customer User
• Work Task(s)

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Why Contextual Inquiry?

• System design is the goal
• Understand peoples tasks in depth
• Surveys and formal interviews are insufficient
• Builds relationship with users

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Apprentice model

• The user is the expert
• The designer is there to learn

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Why be the apprentice?

• Researcher/designer is less threatening
• Not there to judge, evaluate, or test
• People like to talk about themselves when someone
  else thinks theyre interesting!
• Helps get rid of your own assumptions

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Learning in context

• User teaches by doing and talking
• People explain best while they are doing a task
• Prevents generalization
• Implicit knowledge can become explicit

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Finding structure

• Users see tasks and experiences
• Designers identify and abstract patterns,
  strategies, structures from user info
• Designers seek to understand how structures
  relate to goals, environment, other factors

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Communicating structure

• Designers build explanations or mental models
• Designers should verify interpretations with
  users to avoid costly mistakes

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Pitfalls

• Formal interview style
• Keep questions grounded in ongoing tasks
• Users reveal what is important by what they
  choose to talk about
• Users talking abstractly
• Loses detail, loses tacit knowledge
• Dismissing unusual information

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Limitations of Contextual Inquiry

• Large sample populations are infeasible
• Can only see slices of an individuals tasks

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Will you use Contextual Inquiry?

• Maybe you will, maybe you wont
• Depends on access, tasks
• Not always appropriate
• Many guidelines still applicable

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Observation

• You just landed on planet X
• Teach someone to drive in a conf room
• Lots of non-verbal details
• Listen to the language (jargon)
• Videotaping

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Interviews

• Observation grounds interviews
• Keeping the interview open
• Cheat sheets
• Avoid summaries, abstractions
• Create interpretations together
• Tape recording

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Ethnography a related technique
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Participatory Design

• Intersperses design activities with data
  gathering
• Involves users
• Maximizes use of users expertise
• Users dont always know what they need

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Other techniques

• Exercises
• Sorting, ordering
• Focus groups
• Reaction to prototypes
• Surveys
• Detailed data, evaluation

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Triangulation

• Multiple viewpoints
• Different types of data
• Discover bias
• Better data
• Shared understanding

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Consent

• Subjects informed agreement
• What will happen?
• What are the benefits / risks?
• Withdrawal at any time is allowed
• Guardian consent

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Upcoming

• Monday Task Analysis
• DFAB Ch. 7