Field studies
By observing and interviewing users in the context where the site or application will be used, we can understand the context and real-life nature of the tasks it supports. Field studies are one of the most powerful tools we have to ensure that we are solving the right design problems for your users.
(Other terms for this activity are ‘contextual enquiries’ and ‘workplace interviews’).
Benefits
Although users are experts at their jobs, they can’t always say what they need from a new system, or understand its potential. From field studies, we can learn:
- what real users do in real situations
- how they think about their tasks – which strongly affects how they want to work with the site or application
- what language they use to describe things – which strongly affects what they want the things to be called
- what work-arounds they use to combat problems they may not even realise they have – which tells us which design problems we need to address.
What we do
We visit several users in the same location where they perform the tasks on your site/application. For example, if the project is a web site for a financial institution, this may be the user’s home or office. If it’s an intranet or in-house software, it would be staff desks. For a touch-screen system, it might be a pub or shopping mall.
We watch users operating either a different system (the one that will be replaced by the new design), an earlier version of the system, or any procedures they now use in the absence of the new system.
For example, in one project for financial advisers, we watched them using four different applications plus a spreadsheet; all of these were later replaced with one new web site design.
Real-world example
Our client, a financial institution, was redesigning software for their financial planners, who worked mostly in independent, medium-sized firms. Our client had compiled a list of complaints and change requests for the software from financial planners. Most of these changes were small corrections to how the screens currently worked.
During field studies, we observed financial planners receiving calls and conducting client interviews. All their clients wanted to know the answer to one question: “how much money have I made?”.
We observed financial planners using our client's software, plus three other systems and a spreadsheet, then finally a manual calculator, all to answer the key question.
It was clear that while our client’s software did many other useful things, it didn’t easily answer this question. Since it was a key question burning on the lips of their clients, we knew this was the main design problem we needed to solve.
Without observing the financial planners in action, this key design issue was unlikely to have been identified.
