Tips and tricks to conduct contextual inquiry sessions

In case you don’t know what a contextual inquiry is, it’s a semi-structured interview method to obtain information about the context of use, where users are first asked a set of standard questions and then observed and questioned while they work in their own environments.

This is a guide that could help you conduct better contextual inquiry sessions.

BEFORE THE SESSIONS

1. Design your research

Any research activity should be designed before it takes place. This design should be validated with the corresponding stakeholders before the activity happens. That way, you set clear expectations with your client about the kind of output that will be generated after the activity.

The design of your research should at least focus in the following areas:

a. Context of your research

b. Goal of the research

c. Personas that will be involved + type of work they do

d. Qualitative data you want to capture (e.g. goals/pain points/needs, etc)

e. Quantitative data you want to capture (e.g. time on a task, delay between tasks, days per week they do a task, etc)

2. Investigate your customer’s operation

Before proceeding with any contextual inquiry make, sure you have an idea of what you are going to see. So, for example, if you are going to see a logistics department make sure you know at least how a logistics department works at a high-level. Every client will have its differences but at least you will understand the basics and you will be familiarized with terminology and talk in the same language with your users.

3. Align your team

In case you’re leading a research team you need to make sure that your team is aligned about the basics of what a contextual inquiry activity is and how to perform it. There could be cases that your team is composed of people from different backgrounds so it’s important to let them know about the goal of an activity like this and how it works mostly, because the contextual inquiry can be a very tricky activity that if it’s not performed well it could turn into something very chaotic and nonsense.

4. Select suitable team members

Ideally, the team that will handle the contextual inquiry should be composed of:

• 1 Lead designer/researcher that will handle the questions and that will be strictly attached to what was designed and agreed with the customer prior the session.
• 1 Medior designer/researcher that will take notes and observe general context of people that will be shadowed.
• 1 Subject Matter Expert functional resource that complement the designer role by giving expertise about the operation that will be observed.

Note: To me a “designer/researcher” role is a designer with some studies in ethnography or at least with previous experience in research activities. If you don’t have that role, you should at least make sure that at least the design of the research was made by someone with expertise in this kind of activity.

5. Get your photo/video approvals

During the sessions, you should be taking a lot of photos and videos that later on will help you remember situations and see things that didn’t come up in your notes. Please, make sure that your client is aware of that, and you get a formal approval that you can record and utilize the material for internal purposes and for project-related goals.

DURING THE SESSIONS

6. Empathize with your users/participants

Remember that you’re going to face people that perhaps have never been involved in a contextual inquiry activity so they don’t know what you’re actually doing and why you’re doing in it.

One strategy to get them onboard is by giving them a brief of the activity before the sessions take place. This can be done by explaining them what the activity is about, the goal of the sessions, and making them feel as key participants of the activity. The more they trust you, the more they’ll open up to you and give you their honest feedback. Listen to their struggles, understand how you can help them, and figure out a way to win.

7. Take notes, don’t do voice recording unless you have time to hear them all

Voice recording is something quite simple to do, and if you have time to hear them all it’s great and probably the only way for you to capture all the information from the sessions. However, in general projects, you do not have enough time to do this so it’s better if you take notes. Yes, you will capture less information but at least you know that the ones you capture will be related to the variants you need to present to your customer.

AFTER THE SESSIONS

8. The client doesn’t want to know what he knows already

Your client does not pay you to say what he knows already. If he’s hiring you it’s because he notices that there are certain points he has and are affecting their operation, and he would like to solve them. So, your job is to observe them with a different perspective, to measure them, to see others, and to provide potential solutions that can kill them or at least reduce them somehow.

9. Schedule properly

Keep in mind that your day is not only about the contextual inquiry but:

• Brief of the day (1 hr. approx.)

Your day should start with a team meeting where you need to present what will be the goal of the day and the areas that must be captured, as well as the personas that you will face.

• Contextual inquiry (4 hr. approx.)

Because of the amount of information that in my experience you could get in these kind of sessions, I will limit these to 3/4 hours max.

• Debrief of the day (1.5 hr. approx.)

Each session, the research team should have enough time to sit, debrief, talk about the findings of the day, present the results of the day to stakeholders and plan for the following day.

10. Share your findings

Once the sessions are done you need write a sort of inform where you’ll need to summarize your discovering as well as the variants that you capture over the sessions and share with the corresponding stakeholders. This inform is not final but a work in progress but it’s a proof for you client of what you have seen and also that you capture the variants that were agreed previously.

11. Share your final results

Once you feel comfortable with the amount of learnings you have generated, create a package with suitable design assets like: blueprint, customer journey, day in life, etc. that can help you to present your results in an understandable way to your stakeholders. In this final package, please make sure to add all the photos and video you have taken.

The results of contextual inquiry can be used to define requirements, improve a process, learn what is important to users and customers, and just learn more about a new domain to inform future projects.