Assignment P2 -- Contextual Inquiry

Due date: Post on your website and email your TA the URL by Wednesday, 11:59pm, October 11

Todos

  1. Conduct your contextual inqury
  2. Post your writeup on the website

For the contextual inquiry, you are expected to interview at least 3 members of your target user population (no cs147 classmates please) to ascertain their current needs within your problem domain and to learn about their suggestions for how your system could be designed to assist them. As you interview these users you should be thinking about how the contextual inquiry will inform your revised project proposal and design of your system. The deliverable should be concise and no more than 1000 words. We're looking for summary of your findings, not an exhaustive account of interviews.

Privacy: Please preserve your subjects' privacy in your writeup and in your photos of your interviews, or obtain their consent if you wish to post material that identifies your subjects.

Here are some suggestions for questions you should be trying to answer in doing your interviews.

  1. What user group do these people represent?
  2. What is their background?
  3. What skills do they have relevant to your project?
  4. What are their relevant physical characteristics?
  5. What related tasks do they perform currently?
  6. How often are the tasks performed?
  7. What are the time constraints on tasks?
  8. Where and in what conditions are tasks performed? Inside, outside? Classroom, library, laboratory? Relaxed or stressful? Do the environmental conditions make it hard to hold small devices?
  9. How are existing tasks learned? e.g., do they need special training?
  10. What other relevant tools does the user have?
  11. What communication channels do they use in conjunction with the activities (e.g,. phone, IM,...)
  12. What do they see as their needs for better tools/devices?
  13. Are there relevant social concerns (e.g., privacy)
  14. What kinds of breakdowns occur in doing the tasks, and what do they do about them?

Deliverables :

  1. Briefly describe the three interviews - who, where, how long, how the context of the interview related to the needs being addressed in the project.
  2. Identify three main things learned from the interview, identifying specific answers from the above questions that will be most relevant in shaping your design (don't give a laundry list!).
  3. Attach the raw data - interview notes, pictures or scans of artifacts, summaries you made of responses, etc.