The contextual-inquiry method uses the relationship between a master craftsman and apprentice as a model for the interaction between the participant and the researcher. In these situations, you may have to follow up with clarification questions at another time. Direct observation may also be the best field-research option if your participants cannot be interrupted or distracted while they work, such as doctors or flight traffic controllers. Direct observation is similar to contextual inquiry, but the researcher silently observes behaviors most of the time, with minimal interference in the user’s process. In some of these situations, it still may be helpful to observe users go through these experiences to understand general behaviors, but you won’t likely need the added interview component and would mostly rely on direct observation. These types of interfaces are fairly straightforward: they don’t typically require in-depth thought processes or an underlying body of knowledge that UX professionals must understand in order to design them. For this reason, it’s not especially useful for targeted design tasks such as redesigning an ecommerce product page or testing a newsletter signup form on a website.

When Is Contextual Inquiry Not Useful?Ĭontextual inquiry is designed to help us understand the in-depth thought processes of users and the underlying structure of their activities. These were both significant insights that influenced the design of the new tool. They were either not aware or did not trust that the data was saved. They also hit the Save button habitually after every piece of data that was manually entered, even though the program autosaved their progress. They were also crossreferencing a screen from another software tool to fetch several missing pieces of correlating information that needed to be input for each vehicle. What I discovered is that there were several other steps involved that they hadn’t mentioned. Later, I went to observe and interview some of these specialists as they did this process. All three of the specialists I interviewed reported copying large batches of vehicle data from a spreadsheet and pasting it into a data table within the software interface. First, I interviewed several specialists about how they entered vehicle data for entire fleets of commercial vehicles into the software. I was once redesigning the data-entry portion of a software tool used to create auto-insurance policies. You get to see the interruptions, superstitious behaviors, and illogical processes that directly influence UX work. One of the greatest strengths of this methodology is that you get to see things you wouldn’t anticipate and uncover low-level details that have become habitual and invisible. For this reason, contextual inquiry can provide richer and more relevant information about how users complete processes than self-reported or lab-based research methods do. However, users can easily talk about what they are doing and why when they are doing it. People attempt to summarize their processes, but important details like reasoning, motivation, and underlying mental models are left out of this summary, leaving researchers with only a superficial understanding of the users’ approach to the activity. These methodologies rely on the users’ ability to recall and explain a process that they are removed from in that moment. The contextual-inquiry method was developed by Hugh Beyer and Karen Holtzblatt as a way to resolve the drawbacks of other qualitative-research methodologies such as surveys and interviews. Typically we conduct contextual inquiry during the early discovery stages for a new feature or product because this research data is so critical in shaping design choices such as requirements, personas, features, architecture, and content strategy.

Inquiry: The researcher watches the user as she performs her task and asks for information to understand how and why users do what they do.Ĭontextual inquiry is useful for many domains, but it is especially well-suited for understanding users’ interactions with complex systems and in-depth processes, as well as the point of view of expert users.

The context could be in their home, office, or somewhere else entirely.

Context: The research takes place in the users’ natural environment as they conduct their activities the way they normally would.

Its name describes exactly what makes it valuable - inquiry in context:

In our collection of UX-research methodologies, contextual inquiry is essential.Ĭontextual inquiry is a type of ethnographic field study that involves in-depth observation and interviews of a small sample of users to gain a robust understanding of work practices and behaviors.

General thoughts and observations