Contextual Inquiry

Information & Interaction Design

Mick McQuaid

mcq@utexas.edu

University of Texas at Austin

17 Aug 2026

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

Interaction Design

Contextual inquiry

Personas

Scenarios

Prototypes

Contextual Design

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

Contextual inquiry

Radical changes

Short time frame

In the workplace

Relies on familiar work structure

Requires least client time and designer time

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 et al. (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

Contextual Inquiry

Contextual Inquiry Process

Prepare for workplace interviews / observations

Conduct workplace interviews / observations

Interpret workplace interviews / observations

Immersion

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

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

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

Create affinity notes from your atomic observations
Add 500 affinity notes to the diagram
Organize the affinity notes by similarity
Add the bottom level of labels above the affinity notes
Add the temporary top level of labels and reorganize the bottom level of labels and affinity notes to fit them
Remove the temporary top level labels
Add the middle level of labels
Add the top level of labels

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

END

References

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

Beyer, Hugh, and Karen Holtzblatt. 1999. “Contextual Design.” Interactions (New York, NY, USA) 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. Morgan Kaufmann.

Spinuzzi, Clay. 2000. “Investigating the Technology-Work Relationship: A Critical Comparison of Three Qualitative Field Methods.” 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 (Piscataway, NJ, USA), 419–32.

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