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Accelerating contextual inquiry

Academics are known for their pain-staking approach to research, but there are several new ideas emerging from universities that can speed up Contextual Inquiry studies. For these studies, users are asked to perform specific tasks while in their normal environment, such as their home or workplace. Typically, there's a short briefing and interview, followed a session where the user is invited to complete the tasks using the product while the researcher watches. While less goal-directed ethnographic studies can run for months, contextual studies can be completed in weeks, but they've still got a reputation for being time consuming.

Concurrent ethnography is the first idea to cut the time involved. Instead of conducting all the research and then feeding it into the design process, this approach encourages the research and design to run in parallel. This is particularly suitable for iterative design projects, where new ideas can be added in as the finished product (either a digital product or website) evolves.

"Quick and dirty ethnography" is another approach advocated by some academics. Where products or markets evolve quickly, companies cannot allow research to throttle progress. Instead, this approach advocates using a two day evaluation in the user environment to identify in general terms how the user works and how the environment influences their use and the overall usability.

Evaluative ethnography, the third new approach, is where studies set out to confirm or reject ideas that the designer has already developed. The goal is to verify what users do and how they do it, and is best suited to simple research for products or websites with fast development lead times.

Within these approaches, there are several time saving strategies that can speed up the data collection process even further. Directing interviews so that they begin discussing problems straight away can save time, as can taking photos instead of video. A picture provides immediate feedback to the design team, but a video stream takes time to process, review and analyse. A trained researcher can pose probing questions that help test subjects to articulate what they are doing, and these can be asked unobtrusively while users perform tasks. Also, by having two researchers in a session at once, one can focus on the user interaction while another focuses on observing the user's behaviour in the environment.

It's often important to understand how users' physical, cultural and social environments affect how they interact with products. Digital interfaces will be received differently in developing countries, for example, where many of the web design norms taken for granted in developed nations are not yet widely understood. Contextual inquiry can provide the kind of insight into how the environment affects product use that is impossible to capture in lab conditions.

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