CONTEXTUAL INQUIRY: GROUNDING YOUR DESIGN IN USER'S WORK

Contextual Inquiry [4] is a synthesis of ethnographic, field research, and participatory design [8] methods that provide designers with grounded and detailed knowledge of user work as a basis for their design. The tutorial provides an understanding of the fundamental principles behind Contextual Inquiry and practical experiences with methods for data gathering and data analysis.

Keywords:

Contextual Inquiry, Participatory Design, Ethnographic Methods, Qualitative Research, Requirements, System Design

DISCUSSION:

A number of approaches assume that the designer needs to know the capabilities of the technology, the overall work environment, and some static characteristics of the users. Although such knowledge is important, it is insufficient for designing products; designers also need to understand users work process and the context(s) in which those processes occur. Ethnographic techniques like Contextual Inquiry provide a framework and a methodology for helping designers to gain this additional knowledge about users and their work.

Traditionally, designers obtain their knowledge about customers by using methods such as questionnaires, focus groups, and design reviews. While such methods provide designers with useful demographic and opinion data, they rarely provide data that is at a sufficient level of detail or that is adequately grounded in customer work.[3]. Users' understanding of their work often depends upon being in the work situation [10]. In addition, such understandings are often implicit [9]; to uncover them requires a dialog [1].

The tutorial presents the underlying assumptions and distinctions of Contextual Inquiry, provides a framework for understanding different data-gathering approaches and addresses the following methods for getting at users' implicit understandings: work based interviews, post-observation inquiries, artifact walkthroughs, participatory prototyping, and future scenarios.

Many techniques for organizing data aim to reduce its complexity by summarizing it in a few simple statistics. Summary statistics direct designer's attention to a particular aspect of the data and ignore the context in which the data was gathered and the interdependency of numerous data elements. [7]. However, a critical aspect Contextual Inquiry is that it preserves the process being analyzed through the successive transformations. This tutorial provides practical experience with the work-based interview so that attendees learn to elicit the users' experience in the context of their work. It also provides experience in methods of organizing data such as affinity charting.

Various types of data and data-gathering methods provide information that is useful to different aspects of the overall design process. For example, knowledge of the level of motivation and educational background of users can help designers select an appropriate user interface style [6]. To complement such summary information, Contextual Inquiry provides designers with specific user words and user scenarios from which to draw as they make their design decisions.

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