Contextual inquiry, ethnography, documentation and choosing techniques

Contextual inquiry goes to the user and interprets together

Intuition

Sit beside a nurse during a real shift and you see what a questionnaire would never reveal. Contextual inquiry and ethnography both start from that idea, and differ in how long you stay and how much you join in.

Lecture 5 completes the list of seven techniques: survey, interviews, focus groups, observations, contextual inquiry, ethnography and studying documentation. Contextual inquiry combines interview and observation and has four principles.

Mechanism

• Context: go to the user, wherever they are, and see what they do as they do it.
• Partnership: the user and interviewer explore the user’s life together.
• Interpretation: observations are interpreted by the user and interviewer together.
• Focus: guides the interview setup and the focus of the inquiry.

Ethnography immerses, documentation supports

Ethnography also combines interview and observation. Ethnographers immerse themselves in the culture they study. The degree of participation varies, from full participation to full observer, and affects the study. It needs cooperation and acceptance from the people observed, and skills to conduct (simultaneous collection and analysis of data) and skills for the job role (full or partial participation). The lecture links an example paper (ACM DL 10.1145/3290605.3300840) without describing it.

Studying documentation: procedures and rules are often written in manuals, which are a good source for the steps in an activity and any regulations governing a task. It is not to be used in isolation, is good for legislation and background information, and needs no stakeholder time, which limits other techniques.

Pitfall

Do not file ethnography under “observation only”. The slide calls it a combination of interview and observation, same as contextual inquiry. What sets it apart is immersion in the culture and a variable degree of participation.

Choose by four questions, then combine for different views

Compare

Choosing: four factors

• Focus of the study: purpose, kind of data and why.
• Participants: characteristics of the target group, access to them.
• Nature of the technique: specialist equipment or training, investigator experience.
• Resources: time, money, tools, manpower.

Combining: what each adds

• Observation: the context of the activity.
• Interview: views of specific target users.
• Survey: reach a wider population.
• Focus group: a consensus view.

All techniques have advantages and disadvantages, so use a combination to gain different perspectives. This is the same idea as triangulation in Week 4.

Exam detail

The Lecture 4 and Lecture 5 summaries say the same: data gathering techniques gather requirements and feedback from users, every technique has strengths and weaknesses, and you should select and combine techniques to gain different perspectives.

Recall

List the four principles of contextual inquiry.

Context, partnership, interpretation, focus.