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Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox, January 20, 2002:
Summary:
Field studies should emphasize the observation of real user behavior. Simple field studies are fast and easy to conduct, and do not require a posse of anthropologists: All members of a design team should go on customer visits.
Field studies are one of the most valuable methods for setting a design project's direction and discovering unmet user needs. But studying and questioning users does no good if you tell them the answers--because then you won't truly learn anything new.
Last week, The New York Times ran a long article about companies using anthropological techniques to study their customers. It's always great to see articles that promote field studies, but the information in the Times article perpetuated two common mistakes that not only produce bad data, but squander a company's research budget:
Q: "So you feel that grilling outdoors fosters family togetherness?"Perhaps the researcher was simply hamming it up for the press. In any case, the above segment violates several basic interviewing principles:A: "Sure."
Q: "Is there anyone in your family who doesn't enjoy grilling?"
A: "My father."
Q: "But you feel it's a bonding ritual all the same?"
A: "Yeah, kinda."
Q: "How does grilling work in the text of your life? Would charcoal have interfered with the process of social bonding?"
A: "I'm not sure, really. We just prefer gas."
In reality, basic field study techniques are fairly simple, and everyone who works on a design team should go on customer visits from time to time. Visiting a real customer site is an invaluable experience for designers, programmers, and marketers.
Intranet projects need field studies as well, and have an easier time scheduling the visits since they typically involve setting foot in another department or building.
We teach a four-day course in field studies, where we take a design team on a small site visit with some of its customers. Although you're not likely to be as good after four days as somebody who spent four years studying field methods, your team can get good insights for its project from a four-day event. The basics are easy (though clearly violated in the interview protocol quoted above), and anyone can learn to conduct a simple site visit.
Well-funded projects might rely on elaborate field methods that take months or years and require specialized staff. Such projects will probably learn more than projects that go for the fast methods, but they will not necessarily be more successful because the market opportunity may pass them by. Also, smaller studies permit more data collection at more project stages, and exposing team members to live data rather that digested reports is invaluable.
Intranet design teams in particular desperately need to observe actual employee behavior in the field; doing so shows them the real opportunities for improved task support.
Collecting field data and visiting live customers are not the exclusive preserve of a closed guild of experts. It's the duty of all those who plan to inflict their designs on others.