Contextual Inquiry
In contrast with the attitudinal insights obtained from user interviews, in the Discover Phase you can get behavioral information by watching users perform a task. The $10,000 term for this is Contextual Inquiry. You might watch people at work, as they plan a trip, or even mop their floors (that’s how the Swiffer was invented).
Following their task, ask them relevant questions. “Why did you click there? It looked like you were looking for something on the third screen. What was it?”
Contextual Inquiry is a way to get behavioral data, learning users’ actual pain points and successes. You can think of it as usability testing with the user’s existing method.
At Delta Air Lines some years ago, I was part of a team redesigning their call center system, which was used by agents to help people make reservations, fix customer problems, respond to weather outages and other tasks.
We designers understood usability and user experience and could evaluate the current system from a usability perspective. What we didn’t understand was how call center operators worked and what information on these overcrowded screens they found important. We didn’t know what clues they got from data that to us might have seemed insignificant.
We spent as much time as possible at the call centers, watching agents take calls and listening in on special headphones. After each call we asked why they made certain decisions, what fields they consulted, and what was important to them on each screen. At some workstations, we noticed post-it notes taped to their desks and monitors and asked why they kept these, using the answers as clues to help us redesign the application.
A great example of Contextual Inquiry is the Swiffer, which was developed after an ethnographic (think contextual inquiry) study where researchers observed people mopping their floors. Read about it at Continuum Innovation.
A Great Resource
Jim Ross, again, tells you everything you want to know about Contextual Inquiries in this article. At this point you may learn enough by reading about one-third of the way through and just glancing at the topics thereafter. But it’s a great article to keep handy for the future.