Honing Your Research Skills Through Ad-hoc Contextual Inquiry by Will Hacker.
From the post:
It’s common in our field to hear that we don’t get enough time to regularly practice all the types of research available to us, and that’s often true, given tight project deadlines and limited resources. But one form of user research–contextual inquiry–can be practiced regularly just by watching people use the things around them and asking a few questions.
I started thinking about this after a recent experience returning a rental car to a national brand at the Phoenix, Arizona, airport.
My experience was something like this: I pulled into the appropriate lane and an attendant came up to get the rental papers and send me on my way. But, as soon as he started, someone farther up the lane called loudly to him saying he’d been waiting longer. The attendant looked at me, said “sorry,” and ran ahead to attend to the other customer.
A few seconds later a second attendant came up, took my papers, and jumped into the car to check it in. She was using an app on an tablet that was attached to a large case with a battery pack, which she carried over her shoulder. She started quickly tapping buttons, but I noticed she kept navigating back to the previous screen to tap another button.
Curious being that I am, I asked her if she had to go back and forth like that a lot. She said “yes, I keep hitting the wrong thing and have to go back.”
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Will expands his story into why and how to explore random user interactions with technology.
If you want to become better at contextual inquiry and observation, Will has the agenda for you.
He concludes:
Although exercises like this won’t tell us the things we’d like to know about the products we work on, they do let us practice the techniques of contextual inquiry and observation and make us more sensitive to various design issues. These experiences may also help us build the case in more companies for scheduling time and resources for in-field research with our actual customers.