Hello and welcome back. Today we'll be talking about the contextual inquiry method of doing formative work with your users. So if you've seen the other two videos for that I've done on kind of formative methods with the users observations and interviews, those were words that you may have heard in other contexts as well. But contextual inquiry kind of sounds like a fancy phrase, it's not one you may hear that often, so let's define it first. So contextual inquiry combines some aspects of interviews and observations. So for example, it's a focused planned study with a clear purpose that you plan ahead of time. It does use data-driven observations and interviews. And it provides documentation with notes, transcripts, and other supporting data. But what's different about contextual inquiry is that it also emphasizes the natural context. So this is not typically something that is done by inviting a user to a lap out of there natural context. This is something that's typically done where they would actually perform the activity. It also emphasizes the partnerships with participants in collecting and interpreting the data. So it's not just you as a scientist coming in to analyze people under your magnifying glass. But it is in fact this kind of partnership process where you're trying to understand something and you're soliciting the help of your participants in order to understand it. So why would you want to use contextual inquiry? One of the reasons is it actually addresses the different shortcomings that interviews and observations have. You get to observe the action as it happens. You're able to ask questions in the moment so you can, actually, avoid some of that recall and reporting bias that participants may have. And, it allows you to have those follow-up questions to get to the nuances of what and why in understanding an action, which is something that purely observational methods may, actually, struggle with. So, let's give a quick example of a contextual inquiry approach. So, let's say that you want to understand how Electronic Health Records or EHRs are used by actual medical professionals. So, what you may want to do then is actually solicit a medical professional. Follow them in their clinic with their permission, observe and take notes while they complete their tasks using the EHR, and ask interview questions about what you observe. Now, some of these interview questions may come afterwards, at the end of the day, maybe you have a set of questions that you want to get through. But some of those questions may actually be interjected as you get an opportunity. So maybe they, as they're entering something into the system, they exclaim and they're frustrated about something. And, you may ask, wait what happened, why did you go back a few screens? And they're like, I forgot to enter the dosage for this medicine and the rest of the system won't let me proceed, I have to undo all these steps in order to continue. So they kind of provide you with insight right there and then that maybe invisible but may be able to provide some context for what's going on. So how do you do contextual inquiry? Five steps here roughly similar structure to doing observations and interviews. So the first step is arranging access and structuring that partnership, because again it's not just about the observer and the observed. But rather about this idea that you are coming together to understand the activity of interest. You want to prepare your note structure. You want it then conduct the observations and interviews to a sort of part of contextual inquiry. You interpret the findings with the help of the participants and lastly you analyze. So, to arrange the access and to structure the partnership, you need to first figure out who you're going to be observing. For example in the EHR example, you maybe observing a doctor, you maybe observing nurses, you maybe observing sort of medical clerks who are actually entering the data. Those all opportunities in meaning to say who is and who is irrelevant to you. When and where will you observe? So if you're going to particular hospital how many visits will you make? Typically contextual inquiry is done over multiple sessions, because that lets you see a lot more kind of detail about what's going on. And it also kind of prevents people from saving kind of least controversial task to show you on the date your observing. If you're coming from multiple sessions, you're probably getting the most honest view. How will you document the process and what kind of data can you collect? So your participants may actually have some opinions about this, maybe they don't want you to take photographs. In fact, that might be quite common in a hospital, where a patient privacy is really important. So they may not want you to be standing so close behind them that you can see the screen and read people's names, for example. You may also ask when is the good time to actually be jumping in with interview questions? So, if you're observing medical professional doctor entering EHR data, that maybe whenever they maybe able to take a moment to answer the questions. But let's say observing a surgeon during a complicated surgery procedure, maybe they would rather you not jump in with your questions right in the middle of the surgery, but instead note them and wait until after that activity. So these are all important to get with your participants. These are not just decisions you're making, these are the decisions you're making together as a partnership. The next step is preparing your note structure. So again, this is probably very similar to something you saw in earlier videos on observations. You want to figure out what you hope to capture in your notes, what kind of other evidence do you want, what granularity is relevant to you. But then, in addition to all of that, you also want to figure out, when are you going to jump in with questions and what kinds of questions will you ask. So this is kind of a combination, having an observation and an interview protocol. Once you're actually conducting the observations and interviews, agree on clear instructions for both you and the participant. When are you allowed to intervene, when are you allowed to speak up? Where do they want you to be in particular places especially in this kind of a high stake setting like a hospital. And also what do you want the participant to do? Do you want them to show you something special or do you want them to just go about their day as is? Do you want them to verbalize about the activity that they're doing or you want them to describe what they're entering into the EHR system? Set up any necessary equipment you may need for your study, again that's usually some sort of recording, some sort of notes. And then as you're doing it just take notes on pre-prepared structure. Jump in with interview questions when appropriate, or note those interview questions to ask later. It also might be that even though you originally agreed with the participant that you could jump in to ask questions. They may in the moment say, wait, wait not right now, maybe a little bit later. So you may have to kind of adjust on the fly. Afterwards, after the session, actually debrief with your participant. Show them what your notes are. Again, they're a partner in understanding what's actually happening. And you do want them to have that power to say, you noted this, I think you misinterpreted what happened here. Or maybe something even like, you noted this, but maybe we can keep this off-record, because this is a little bit embarrassing. And in these cases, you do have to respect the rights of the participant. I also like reviewing the notes and transcripts after the observation and writing those field notes about the experience. Again because it can be very easy to forget some piece of insight that you had while you were observing, unless you actually kind of reflect and right away after the study. So again after each observation study make sure to schedule some time where you just are sitting down, and reflecting, and writing your field notes. The fourth step is interpreting with participants, and it's kind of unique to its contextual inquiry approach. You want to both debrief after each session, and also the conclusion of the study. And the goal here is to retell the story of your inquiry from your perspective. It's typically chronological, so you just say, you know, I came into the hospital and I saw that you are visiting with patient X. Afterwards you took the paper chart and you entered some information from the paper chart into the computer that's located on the hall etc., etc., etc. Be sensitive to the fact that your participants may actually be impacted by the stories that you tell and be flexible in your reporting. So as I mentioned, sometimes participants may actually ask you to take out some piece of information and I don't think we should ever lie in the way you report your data. But sometimes, some omissions can really help protect the participants and you need to be respectful of that. They're putting themselves in a vulnerable situation, they don't need to volunteer for your study. And so they're kind of doing you a favor, so you may as well respect their rights. The last step is Analyzing, and so as I mentioned before we have a whole entire lecture on qualitative analysis and quantitative analysis, so I'll kind of leave that for the later videos. So what are the strength of contextual inquiry? One strength is that you can again start work with no knowledge or hypothesis before starting to get a data driven method, so you don't need to know a lot about the context before coming in and observing. It does also provide you that rich nuanced data and it does focus on the actual process rather than the processes reported through recall. It does reveal those specific, concrete, unedited actions taken by the participants in the given context. But it also reveals the internal and physical aspects of a participant's experience like motivation, affect, identity, priorities, preferences, mental models, and all of that because you're also able to ask about the experience. Whether in the moment or because you've noted a question to ask later. Now of course, no method is perfect, so even contextual inquiry has some weaknesses. The one that requires a lot of time and effort. Generally it's a very small number of users, even smaller than interviews could be, because you maybe spending days following particular users in order to get to observe an activity of interest. It does require that access to and cooperation of participants in a specific context. And it's particularly critical in this method, because as I said, you're really soliciting the participants as partners in gathering, interpreting, and understanding their data. And of course just as another observational studies it does rely on the task of interest being frequent enough to observe. So if you were focused on a very specific EHR entry task like maybe an EHR entry task that has to do with a particular rare disease. You may not actually be able to observe that in the moment, because if it's something that only happens once a year, and you're there only observing it for three days, that may not happen during that day. So if you'd like more information about contextual inquiry, there's an excellent book about this, where I guess chapter about this in the participatory design book and from the inventors of this method, really. And if you want kind of a shorter reading, if you don't feel like you can read an entire chapter, there's a really excellent article called Apprenticing with the Customer, that again, I link here if you have access to the ACM digital library. I hope you check it out, and I hope to see you in the later videos, thank you.
