Time to get out of your (home) office, and observe your users in their habitat: Contextual Inquiry

As UX professionals, we’re always striving to truly understand the people we’re designing for. During the pandemic, when all we could do was remote user testing, interviews and surveys (if we were lucky, we used dscout to run diary studies to get some badly needed user-recorded context) , our understanding fell short of revealing the full picture with a high level of details, and the more. nuanced why’s to our users’ actions (or lack thereof).

Now that we are all more of less back to our regular lives, we can again strive to build a better understanding of our users’ ways of accomplishing their goals.

Consider  contextual interviews.

This approach involves watching and interviewing people in their typical environments. Y It’s often described simply as “shadowing someone, looking over someone’s shoulder and asking questions,” with a focus on observing customers where they naturally operate, whether that’s at their desk, in a grocery store, or at home.

Why choose this immersive approach?

  • Revealing the ‘Why’: Most surveys and classic usability tests tell you what the problem is (e.g., a process step is problematic or users have trouble with a specific task), but it’s very difficult to identify the underlying root cause or the why from this data. Contextual interviews allow you to meet users and observe them in context to understand their thinking and rationale.
  • Uncovering Unconscious Behaviors: People often act in a way they aren’t even conscious of. By watching users in their usual habitats, you can identify problems, inefficiencies, or workarounds they compensate for without realizing. Users are unlikely to report behaviors they aren’t aware of.
  • Memory is highly contextual: When customers are not “in the moment,” they often forget the important details critical for successful product and service experiences. Observing them in their environment triggers their memories and allows for more accurate recall of their processes.
  • Identifying Ingenious Solutions Contextual research can reveal “amazing lengths” that “superusers” go to make existing (flawed) systems work. Observing these real-world innovations can inform and infuse what and how you design. Swiffer was born when researchers observed homemakers as they were cleaning their kitchen floor.
  • Get a different lens to experience reality: You must start by dispelling your (and your company’s) assumptions about what customers need. Even if you were the target customer in the past, the world changes, and you are not the customer today. Contextual research helps you embrace your customer’s current reality and challenges.

  1. Getting Started: The Contextual Interview Mindset
You are there to learn and observe, and not to give advice or educate.

Imagine you are an actor learning to play their role or taking over for them while they are away.

Conducting the Interview: Steps and Advice

Contextual interviews should ideally be about 90 minutes long, though this can vary depending on the participant group. You need enough time to observe their typical activities and talk to them about their perspective. Regarding the number of interviews, aim for 8 to 12 people per relevant user group to identify trends, but remember that any amount is always better than zero.

Here are some pointers for conducting the interview:

  • Observe customers in their native environment, as they are doing the things you seek to improve through your products/services. The more immersive and closer to their actual day, the better.
  • Ask questions: While observing, ask questions to understand why they are doing what they are doing. Examples of questions include:
    • What would I need to know to be successful at your job?
    • Where would I get started?
    • What would I have to keep in mind?
    • What could go wrong?
    • What drives you crazy sometimes?
    • How long have you been doing this?
    • How did you get started?
    • What do you like about the job?
    • What do you do when you are not here?
    • What do you hope to achieve?
    • What would make you feel accomplished/happy/satisfied?
    • Ask why they do things; even if they rationalize, their answers provide clues about how they frame problems and their underlying assumptions.
    • Ask customers what they would call a concept or action and use their terms.
  • Be like them: Try to blend in and minimize your influence. Dress appropriately for the context, be ready to adapt to their environment (e.g., sitting on the floor, eating pizza), and if they take off their shoes, you should too.
  • Minimize your influence – be a fly on the wall: It can be tough not to suggest solutions or features you know would help, but your role is to observe their perspective and reality, no matter how difficult it is to watch.
  • Go with the flow: While you should have a set of questions, be ready to roll and let the conversation naturally head towards what’s important to them.
  • Subtle recording: Use subtle methods like a wireless mic, a compact camera, or your cell phone for pictures. Bring a notebook, not a computer, for immediate note-taking. It’s a good sign if they follow their normal routine, like answering the phone, or getting up for a cup of coffee without considering you.

When observing, you can also consider:

  • Artifacts: What physical or digital items are they using? What’s on their desk?
  • Communication: How do they communicate and collaborate?
  • Interruptions: What interrupts their work and how often?
  • Related factors: What other tasks or tools are they using?

From Data to Insights: Organizing Your Findings

After collecting all your observations, notes, quotes, images, and videos, the process of making sense of it all can feel overwhelming. The key is to identify patterns and trends.

Here’s a recommended process:

  1. Review and Write Down Observations: Go through your notes and recordings and pull out bite-sized findings, quotes, and observations about user actions. Write these down on sticky notes.
  2. Organize by Participant and the six aspects listed below After reviewing each participant, organize your sticky notes. Then, align all the notes into six columns, corresponding to six aspects (what John Whalen calls Six Minds1) of the experience.
    • Vision/Attention: What captures their attention? What are they looking for and why?
    • Wayfinding: How do they navigate within products or services? What do they expect?
    • Language: What words do they use? What does this suggest about their expertise?
    • Memory: What assumptions do they make? When are they surprised or confused?
    • Decision Making: What are they trying to accomplish? How are they framing problems? What decisions do they make, and what blocks them?
    • Emotion: What are their goals and worries? How do they feel? Some findings may overlap, but categorize each under the most important component for you as the designer.
  3. Look for Trends and Create Segmentation: Look for trends and commonalities across participants. This can lead to audience segmentation and provide important insights for future product direction.

Conclusion

Contextual inquiry is a powerful method for UX researchers to move beyond surface-level understanding and truly grasp the complexities of users’ lives, work, and needs. By observing explicit behaviors and implicit nuances in their natural environment, you gain insights that surveys and usability tests often miss. Embracing this approach allows you to step into your users’ reality, leave assumptions at the door, and discover the ‘why’ behind their actions. The insights gathered through this immersive process can lead to more informed design decisions and, ultimately, better product and service experiences.


  1. John Whalen, PhD: Design for How People Think. Using Brain Science to Build Better Products. O’Reilly, 2019 ↩︎

UX Reckoning – January 2025

Many UX professionals (myself included), rightfully, feel threatened by AI’s ubiquity. It is uncanny how long it has come in an extremely short time right before our eyes. I remember hearing about it at the Computer Science department where I used to teach, and I dismissively thought this was just a hobby for nerds. How wrong I was! We cannot dismiss AI’s capabilities anymore, no matter how much we want to. And boy, do we want to!

But, as Kate Moran and Sarah Gibbons point out in their clear-sighted article, our critical thinking, creativity, taste, and soft skills are superpowers that make us as needed (if not more) as ever. AI can serve as an intern and a first draft generator (thank you, Joe Natoli, for the amazing ideas you shared in your webinar)
My only concern is how we can convince business leaders and hiring managers to see it the same way and not rely on algorithms. Maybe I should ask perplexity about that:-)

Inclusive UX = Thoughtful Design

What is Inclusive User Experience?

As the name suggests, users (people, site visitors, clients, customers, etc) feel that they personally are considered and welcome in that space, be it digital or physical. One example is the

Humans come in all shapes and sizes, abilities, preferences, cultures, past experiences, identities, and sensitivities. Caring individuals take all that into account when interacting with us in person, reading us and our reactions. But can user interfaces do that?

How do we go about creating inclusive experiences?

Can user interfaces communicate our respect for our users?

To a large extent, yes. Whether they accomplish that depends largely on the thoughtfulness of the design.

  1. While we share our basic humanity and a desire to be treated with respect, we can NOT assume that people using our product are just like us. They are not. I am not like the person who, just to take a not-so-random example, designed LinkedIn (don’t get me started) or Facebook. Previously, I listed a few dimensions of how we differ (and I did not even get into situational and temporary variability) and as a result, we have different needs and expectations.
  2. A lot of these differences are basic, such as skin color. One great example of an interface that does it right comes from E.L.F., a cosmetic company. Their website does not just pay lip service (pun intended) to embrace all skin colors but helps their customers find the right tints both based on adjectives (such as fair, tan, rich) AND by uploading/getting an image of your face when they choose ‘virtual try-on’.
https://www.elfcosmetics.com/halo-glow-powder-filter/300247.html

3. For many of these differences, we express our respect for our users by giving them choices and not imposing our own preferences (e.g., pronouns, greetings, tone, settings of non-static content).

In general, we can think of inclusivity in three main areas of design:

  1. accessibility
  2. content
  3. tone

TO BE CONTINUED

Python Data structures

FeaturesListTupleDictionarySetSeries (pandas)Dataframes (pandas)
Ideal for
Sequential, mutable dataSequential, immutable dataMapping dataRemoving duplicates, set operationsTime series, single variable analysisMulti-variable analysis, data manipulation
Main Use caseStoring ordered collectionsImmutable sequencesKey-value pairsUnique elements
Single column data
Tabular data
Data typeAny
AnyAny (for values)Immutable types onlyHomogeneousHeterogeneous (by column)
OrderedYesYesYes NoYesYes
Mutable*YesNoYesYesYesYes
Access byIndexIndexKeyN/AIndex or labelRow/column index or label
Allows duplicatesYesYesNoNoYesYes

* Refers to whether an object can be changed after it is created. Immutable objects provide a level of safety and predictability in certain scenarios, but mutable objects can be more memory-efficient for operations that require frequent modifications.

If only we could talk to more of our users …. B2B edition

The bane of any UX researcher’s work is finding participants to get relevant information. Well, in some B2C contexts it may not be so difficult, as long as you make sure your participants are indeed the ones you want to talk to – more on screening willing people as often some are just not who they claim to be.

B2B is a different beast – here are some ideas to consider:

Your pool is limited

There are only so many people who you can talk to – maybe your company has 100 clients and you can talk to them only so many times.

What can you do?

  1. Get creative with recruitment – go to conferences and trade meetings, use connections, but stop at kidnappings.
  2. Leverage look-alike audiences – think about what other groups of people are similar to your target audience. E.g., you need to talk to pharmacists placing orders on your website. What other people place orders and have to contend with strict regulations?
  3. Create a research program

Your pool is shared

An extra challenge is that the pie of potential participants is “nibbled on” by other segments of your company, most often the product and marketing teams. If you get a client to talk to, they will often complain that they have “already explained it to your colleague just a week ago”. This is frustrating to both sides. Or, the company will have a list of potential participants, shared by the departments and whoever gets to the list first, wins.

What can you do?

  1. Collaborate with Customer success reps –
    • They want the same things as you do – get satisfied customers, who are happy with the service and/or feel listened to.
    • They have a wealth of information that you can mine, to the extent that you may not even need to talk to an end user, OR know which customers are the most worthwhile to talk to AND get the relevant context so that your customers do not have to repeat themselves.
  2. Establish guidelines and guardrails for your colleagues.
    • Share the information you have already collected – UX researchers can often answer questions that the marketing team wants to know, and vice versa.
    • Combine questions you would pursue in a conversation with a client. Often clients do not need to interface with two different professionals from your company when answering a few questions.
    • Create a spreadsheet with contact information and a schedule for accessing your clients. Agree on the frequency of contact and how you divide up the access times.

Your participants are busy professionals

This needs no explanation or elaboration

What can you do?

  1. Make is frictionless and easy for your participants to sign up. Basically, apply your UX knowledge to reduce any frustration:
    • make your invitation email clear and easy to understand, and scan. If in doubt, A/B test your invitation email for future recruitment efforts
    • If you need your participants to sign any NDAs, include the link in the invitation email.
    • Offer a direct link to schedule, and enable the participant to automatically add it to their calendar
  2. Schedule shorter sessions
    • I know, this one is painful but you are more likely to recruit your target audience
    • Often, your busy participants realize how important and/or enjoyable it is to talk to you. They will then extend the session, or want to schedule a follow-up session.

How about incentives?

This is where the legal department enters the scene. Quite often, your B2B participants are not allowed to accept financial incentives. But here are the plus sides (though you may look at not having to pay already a plus side):

  • B2B participants (assuming they are your clients, and not look-alikes) are heavily invested in improving your product as they are the primary beneficiaries.
  • Offering to send a token of appreciation (e.g, mug, Tshirt) is often received with gratitude and grace, but really, nothing replaces a heartfelt, genuine thank you from you!