[Sigia-l] Remote Contextual Inquiry, yeah right!

[Peter VanDijck]

This labeling confusion in the user research space is pretty weird.

Contextual Inquiry, as a design technique, was introduced by by Hugh
Beyer and Karen Holtzblatt in the book "Contextual Design : A
Customer-Centered Approach to Systems Designs". It's really good.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1558604111

The master-apprentice part of it is this: the observer sits together
with the subject and takes on an apprentice role, asking a few questions
now and then while the subject does their job. This is very different
from a usability test or a structured interview, say. And it is very
different from the technique described in the article.

You're right: "in contextual inquiry you take all the environment into
account", that's why it's called contextual. But a usability test on
location, taking the environment into account (what the article
described, but done remotely), is still different from the contextual
inquiry technique as it is known. You could say the research is
contextual, but calling it by the name of a well known, well described
technique, which it's not, really only confuses things for everyone.

When you say "decide what is important while being there", that's a
property of what is called the "open ended" phase of research, where you
still don't know what you're looking for. Interviews can be open ended,
usability tests can use open ended scenarios. 

I'm not sure if I'm being clear here...

Peter

Marcel van Mackelenbergh wrote:
> > (the master-apprentice
> > relationship step is the defining characteristic of the contextual
> > inquiry method
> 
> Peter,
> 
> Can you elaborate on that? I always thought that the difference between
> a contextual inquiry and a user analysis is:
> - in contextual inquiry you take all the environment into account and
> decide what is important while being there
> - user analysis focuses purely on tasks