Info & Interaction Design, Contextual Inquiry

Mick McQuaid

2024-09-16

Week FOUR

But first … Project Focus

• Client opportunity
• What are your ideas?
• More important to get it right at this stage than to be on time (being on time will matter more later)
• Being on time earns you forgiveness for problems we’ll address today

Recap, Last week

• Audiences
• Epochs
• Bad design

Triangles

Make your own triangle, showing two “green” bubbles, one for where you are now and one for where you aspire to be

I put green in quotes because they don’t need to be green. Any colors or no colors will do. In fact, modify the words on the vertices as well to be the three most fundamental skills you have or need. All that matters is that it is a triangle. A rectangle won’t work for showing your preferred location. It’s too complicated.

Please put the result in the Assignments > Triangles box on Canvas immediately.

Interaction Design

• Contextual inquiry
• Personas
• Scenarios
• Prototypes

For the next four sections: contextual inquiry, personas, scenarios, and prototyping, we are concerned with interaction design. After that, we’ll think more about information design. The method of interaction design we’ll practice in our prototypes in this course requires the use of these tools so that interaction designs are centered around users. There are two main textbooks for this study.

Contextual Design

Please read Holtzblatt, Wendell, and Wood (2005), chapters 3–5 for the most complete introduction to the topic. I can tell you frankly that I look closely at the quality of the affinity diagrams for evidence of effective work on the contextual inquiry milestone.

But before we consider contextual design …

Let’s consider the broader question of how you study users

Three ways to study users

• Contextual inquiry
• Ethnography
• Participatory design

Spinuzzi (2000) compares contextual inquiry with other approaches, so you can see why we emphasize contextual inquiry and what we might do instead (ethnography or participatory design).

Contextual inquiry

• Radical changes
• Short time frame
• In the workplace
• Relies on familiar work structure
• Requires least client time and designer time

The key sentence in Spinuzzi (2000) suggests using contextual inquiry to make radical changes in a short time frame. It relies on an underlying work structure that reduces the amount of time you have to spend to understand the workplace, so it’s not suitable for completely alien work processes. It requires minimal client time because of its reliance on underlying structure.

Participatory design

• Incremental changes
• Empowering users
• Medium client time and designer time
• Improved user acceptance

Spinuzzi (2000) recommends participatory design for making incremental changes and empowering users. It requires a great deal of client time, used to improve user acceptance of the design.

Bannon, Bardzell, and Bødker (2018) invite us to reimagine participatory design and briefly discusses its roots in 1970s Scandinavia as a politically-oriented approach to democratizing the process of design between designers and other stakeholders. They note that the political dimension of participatory design has diminished over the years and invite a rethinking of what democracy means today. They call on researchers in an era of globalization and political extremism to use design in service of a more equitable world. They claim that that pursuit can be shaped by core emphases of participatory design, including

• public participation,
• sensitivity to social conflict,
• shared trust,
• mutual learning,
• security, and
• fairness.

Ethnography

• Radical changes in exotic workplaces
• Requires the most client time and designer time
• Usually used for poorly understood work environments
• Designers immerse themselves in the work environment
• E.g., Barley’s epic study of radiologists

Ethnography works best if a great deal of time (both client time and designer time) is available and a detailed understanding of work is required. The classic example of this in information technology is Stephen Barley’s studies of technology adoption by radiologists. Barley obtained an MD in the course of his incredibly long study in order to better understand the work of radiologists.

Spinuzzi (2000) claims that ethnography can be used to effect radical changes and is the only possible choice in an exotic workplace. It requires maximal client time.

Contextual Inquiry

Because of its minimal time requirements, contextual inquiry is the most popular of three methods we’ve considered, and we’re going to learn it.

Holtzblatt, Wendell, and Wood (2005) describes the most commonly used of the above three methods. It’s the most common for a chain of reasons. First, the reliance on an underlying work structure minimizes the need for client time, always an attractive feature in a resource-constrained workplace. Second, the direct manipulation of the underlying work structure means that existing design artifacts can be sidestepped and radical changes are possible without time-consuming study and modification of existing design artifacts.

Contextual Inquiry Process

• Prepare for workplace interviews / observations
• Conduct workplace interviews / observations
• Interpret workplace interviews / observations

Because contextual inquiry and its umbrella, contextual design, have been so successful and so inexpensive to implement, you are more likely to participate in it in the workplace than in any other design method. One hallmark of contextual design you may experience is the method’s reliance on extremely large numbers of post-it notes containing atomic observations about the subject work.

A team conducting a contextual inquiry typically immerses itself in a mass of these post-it notes, following a structured method for grouping and regrouping the notes to make sense of the subject work and to organize the observations of the client participants to reveal the essential characteristics that will inform the new design.

Immersion

This photo shows the picture of immersion from Beyer and Holtzblatt (1999), the article that introduced contextual inquiry. Notice the 90s era personal computer in the foreground. Today, it’s relatively easy to do this immersion using FigJam or Miro or similar tools.

Prepare for the interview

Who should you interview?

• Each team member should interview at least two people for this assignment
• Consider roles not titles
• Consider context
• Consider the work you will support
• Consider who all is involved
• Consider where information comes from

What contexts should be sampled?

• Consider different work and social contexts
• Strive for variety
• Could use differences in productivity as a basis (careful!)

Interview style

• Intermittent work (most common)
• Uninterruptible work
• Extremely long work
• Mobile Work
• Extremely focused work

Logistics

• Distance
• Resistance
• Confidentiality and security
• Time commitment (two hours if you can get it)
• Cultural issues
• Dress
• Spacing of interviews (as tight as possible)
• Coordinating with interpretation sessions
• Lost interviews

How do you get interviews?

• Vendors
• Sales
• Sales support
• Management
• Tech support
• User advocate
• Advertise

This is perhaps the hardest part for students. You’re not part of a company that gives you some cachet with certain groups. Instead, you have to be creative. The least common denominator is to go on social media and ask random people to help you. That’s the easiest and least effective approach. Success in this aspect of the milestone depends very much on whether you have, or can make, contacts.

Share interview techniques

• Two interviewers
• Avoid recording (unless on a platform like Zoom)
• Avoid Zoom (try to be live in the workplace)
• Don’t fear silence
• Use work artifacts if live

You have to share your successful and unsuccessful interview techniques in a conversation. I can start the conversation with a few suggestions but you have to take from there. So here are a few commonly mentioned points about interviews.

The most successful interview has two interviewers. One takes notes and the other speaks. Don’t divide the speaking. The one who takes notes should rarely speak and then only because the speaking interviewer has forgotten something. The speaking interviewer tries to maintain engagement with the subject. The speaking interviewer tries to keep the subject talking as much as possible and on-topic as much as possible. That job requires the full concentration of one person. That person should not try to do other things at the same time.

Avoid recording devices. If you do use a recorder, make it one that is very easy to operate and not intimidating and leave it on the table between you and the subject. Invite the subject to turn it off if they need to go off the record. You may want to turn it back on after the secrets have been shared. On the other hand, your experience may tell you that it has been inhibiting the subject or been the focus of the subject’s attention. You may want to announce that we don’t need it further and pocket it in that case. There is a balance, by the way, in the user interface of a recorder. It has to be able to tell you it is recording but it also has to fade into the background. Lots of recording devices, including one I often use, go too far one way or the other.

The most typical problem students have in interviews is that they fear silence. Can you allow enough silence to elapse to let your subject gather their thoughts? If not, what can you do?

Look puzzled. If there is too much eye contact, just write a question mark on your notepad or draw a simple shape like a circle or square and look puzzled again.

Look at artifacts. Any diagrams you generate in your interviews are artifacts that you can look at silently with your interview subject. Just don’t say anything at all and look intently at each artifact.

Ask the same question over and over. If the subject is reluctant to speak, just ask them to say more about that.

Ask hypothetical questions. Activate the subject’s imagination by asking them to place themselves into a situation and say what they would do.

Allow the initial speech, then stay on topic. Experience shows that subjects have rehearsed a certain speech about whatever is bothering them. They have to be allowed to declaim that speech. If not, they will keep losing track of your questions as they seek an opportunity to insert the speech. Once that is out of the way, let them refer back to it but do not allow them to repeat the whole speech or to give the certain speech about another issue. If you interview a subject about something they would like to be different, the interview may trigger associations with other things they would like to be different. You may feel the need to express empathy and tell analogous stories from your own experience. You should rehearse any such stories beforehand so you can abbreviate them as much as possible.

Overtly display respect and appreciation for the subject. I may have mentioned the robotics team of undocumented alien high-schoolers from Phoenix who defeated MIT in 2005. (There’s a Wired profile of it that gets linked from various blogs every few months.) One of the key reasons they are thought to have defeated MIT was that, when they interviewed experts in underwater robotics, they treated the experts much better than did the haughty MIT team. One of the experts, interviewed by Wired later, said he gave them a lot more help than he gave the MIT team and that he began to think of himself as a member of their team. You can’t buy that kind of help.

Don’t bother to ask if a subject can think of anything else. Instead, stimulate them to think of something else. You can stimulate them by asking them about situations. When was the last time X happened? If they say something never happens, keep searching for that one time.

Conduct the interview

Materials

• Work from a checklist and a script
• Deal with confidentiality
• Give an introductory talk
• Give an opportunity for unexpected issues

Unexpected issues may include

• Preference to meet in conference rooms rather than the workplace
• Confidentiality issues
• Time constraints
• Talking to the wrong person
• Realization that you need two interviews because the person acts in two roles
• No-shows

Procedure

• Introduce yourself
• Reinforce your focus
• Set expectations
• Defer to the user as expert
• Describe confidentiality policy (maybe again)
• Get permission to record (if you want to record)
• Deal with opinions about tools or companies
• Explain that interruptions are interesting
• Look for opportunities to do contextual inquiry

Continued procedure

• Transition to work focus
• Observe and discuss
• Be nosy
• Take notes (avoid using a laptop)
• Know what to take notes about!

What to take notes about

• The user’s role
• The user’s responsibilities
• The user’s communication types
• The user’s organization of physical space
• The user’s artifacts (get copies if possible)
• Breakdowns in the user’s work
• What works and what doesn’t

Interview activities

• Share design ideas stimulated by events
• Draw the physical space
• Take photos (if you get permission)

Wrap up

• Summarize what you learned, check your high-level understanding
• Ask about pet issues
• Give tips about system use (avoid doing so earlier)
• Thank the user and give a gift if possible
• Be sure you followed Holtzblatt’s tips in Tables 4-1 through 4-5!

Views of the CI interview

Interpret the interviews

Intro

• Today usually done via FigJam or Miro instead of on a wall with post-its
• Should happen 48 hours after the interviews (or sooner)
• You should NOT talk to your teammates (or anyone else) about the interviews before the interpretation session
• You should never do it alone
• Must be synchronous
• Usually takes all day

Interpretation session steps overview

1. Create affinity notes from your atomic observations
2. Add 500 affinity notes to the diagram
3. Organize the affinity notes by similarity
4. Add the bottom level of labels above the affinity notes
5. Add the temporary top level of labels and reorganize the bottom level of labels and affinity notes to fit them
6. Remove the temporary top level labels
7. Add the middle level of labels
8. Add the top level of labels

Note that there are three levels of affinity labels and one level of affinity notes. The affinity note copies one thing a participant said. It is the atom of the contextual inquiry universe. For example, a participant might say “I hate the menus because they are hard to navigate.” The affinity labels are top, middle, and bottom. For example, the bottom level label above the note just mentioned might be “challenges navigating the menus”, while a midle level label above that might be “menus” or “navigation”, depending on other affinity notes.

First steps

• Write affinity notes in the first person
• Use words that mean the same to everyone
• Let the meaning emerge from the groups instead of predefining
• Reorganize hard-to-label groups rather than wrestling with unsatisfying label wording

Bottom level of affinity labels

• Start when you can’t keep track of the affinity notes
• Give them design relevance
• Highlight distinctions rather than trying to bring groups together

Temporary top level of affinity labels

• Helps you move the affinity notes around into positions closer to their final positions
• Only half a dozen temporary top labels
• Remove them when this step is complete

Middle level of affinity labels

• Highlight highlevel work concepts
• Steps in work
• Communication strategies in work
• Tool use
• Organizational structure

Top level of affinity labels

• Describe the key issues relevant to the design
• Inform the behavior patterns that will be the basis for personas
• Any break in the chain from interview to key issues jeopardizes the persona milestone, coming up next

Example of the relationship between a top level label and those below it

Different views of the process

Activity: Fake an interview

• Spend the next half hour interviewing each other in pairs
• Pretend you’re a subject matter expert in your project
• Pretend you’ve never met
• Do both sides in the interview
• If you’re a group of three, do two on one; if four, break into two pairs

References

Bannon, Liam, Jeffrey Bardzell, and Susanne Bødker. 2018. “Reimagining Participatory Design.” Interactions 26 (1): 26–32. https://doi.org/10.1145/3292015.

Beyer, Hugh, and Karen Holtzblatt. 1999. “Contextual Design.” Interactions 6 (1): 32–42.

Holtzblatt, Karen, Jessamyn Burns Wendell, and Shelley Wood. 2005. Rapid Contextual Design: A How-to Guide to Key Techniques for User-Centered Design. San Francisco, CA: Morgan Kaufmann.

Spinuzzi, Clay. 2000. “Investigating the Technology-Work Relationship: A Critical Comparison of Three Qualitative Field Methods.” In IPCC/SIGDOC ’00: Proceedings of IEEE Professional Communication Society International Professional Communication Conference and Proceedings of the 18th Annual ACM International Conference on Computer Documentation, 419–32. Piscataway, NJ, USA: IEEE Educational Activities Department.

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