As part of a project I’m working on, my team is learning contextual inquiry, which is a way to conceive and build usable products through watching people in their work environment. Prior to actually going out into the field, a team of us are relying on our resident expert (Ryan) to train us. He’s been doing contextual inquiry for a few years.
Our training methods may not have been perfect, but we worked with what we had. We needed to be able to set up a situation where we could get some experience observing someone doing something over a few hours. Lucky for us, it turned out to be something very interesting- we observed Ryan tying fishing flies.
Ryan grew up fly fishing with his uncle and grandfather where he developed expertise and passion for the sport. Over his life, he’s tied thousands of flies and has become quite the expert tier.
For the observation, we trainees pretended that we were from a fly fishing tool vendor visiting Ryan to watch him Ryan tie flies. By watching him, we hope to gather information that could help us create an innovative fly-tying product or tool.
So, we left the house and came back in as the "researchers". We watched Ryan prepare for tying flies and asked non-leading questions. Our goal was to leave Ryan’s house with data that would paint a complete picture of Ryan’s environment, attitudes, practices, tools, etc. As we watched him prepare, we took lots of notes.
We asked Ryan to think out loud, to describe what he was doing and why. This gave us insights into his train of thought, into the processes he used to tie flies. Further, we watched his actions- his posture, the way he used tools. We looked for gaps and breakdowns in the process.
As he tied 12 flies over 3-4 hours, he also talked about his experiences and influences. We learned about fly fishing culture and what was “cool�? to his peer group.
After the observation was over, we debriefed. We built models that illustrated his physical environment, his interactions with people, his attitudes and his tasks. These models were all informed by what we observed Ryan *doing*. It was apparent that what Ryan said he did and what he actually did could be very different.
At the end of the day, we did have ideas. Through watching Ryan work, it became clear that there were breakdowns in his work processes; there were areas that needed improvement, tools that needed enhancements. We could envision products that could make his fly tying easier. Further, we could see great value in observing five other people like Ryan, who could all be factors in a future design decision.
The training further instilled in me a belief that there are incredible opportunities in using this type of research to develop innovative and usable products. Contextual Inquiry is a resource-intensive process, but one that can provide very rich and useful information that matches closely with reality.
Soon we will be out in the field doing these observations in a very real context and I hope to share some of these experiences as well.