Tutorial #14

Contextual Inquiry: Grounding Your Design in User Work

Dennis Wixon, Alicia Flanders, Digital Equipment Corporation
Minette Beabes, XEROX corporation

Sunday, April 14, full-day

Benefits

You will obtain a solid foundation for conducting field research with customers and incorporating your findings into product development. You will learn about Contextual Inquiry methods and when and how to apply them.

Origins

This is an updated version of a highly rated tutorial from CHI'95.

Features

understand the fundamental concepts and principles of Contextual Inquiry (CI)
selecting appropriate CI methods for different design situations
conducting interviews using the principles of CI
structuring data from a CI interview for use in design
comparison of CI to other methods of data gathering
how CI fits into the product development process
some of the CI methods that are covered include:
- post-observation inquiry
- artifact walk through
- future scenario
- prototype test drive
links between CI and engineering methods, and usability techniques

Audience

Anyone who needs to understand the customer. Intended participants include: usability specialists, software developers, information specialists, those gathering customer requirements, managers of the overall product development effort, and managers of usability groups.

Presentation

Lecture with an emphasis on real-life examples, video, and hands-on exercises

Instructors

Dennis Wixon is program manager for usability at Digital Equipment Corporation. Over the past 15 years, he has helped to pioneer methods to improve user interfaces for software and hardware and has recently concentrated on the use of field research methods such as CI. Alicia Flanders is a principal usability engineer at Digital Equipment Corporation, where she works on the design and evaluation of software products. Minette Beabes worked at Digital Equipment Corporation as a senior usability engineer and a change agent for including the voices of customers into product design processes; she is currently a senior usability engineer at XEROX Corporation.