- At our September virtual UX conference,
an attendee asked Dr. Jakob Nielsen,
"What's the subtle difference
"between a field study, a contextual inquiry,
"and an ethnographic study?"
Here's what he had to say.
- This, I think, is a great example
of the vocabulary inflation
that I talked about in the mini keynote,
before we started the conference,
if any of you heard that.
The general point is that this field
is really kinda plagued with
people constantly coming up with new
words and names for the same thing,
or even things that are just slightly, slightly different.
This would be a great example of that.
I actually always like
to just use the term field study
because, to me, the defining point is really
the distinction between that and laboratory study.
There's really two ways you can get with users,
cause users can come to us or we can come to the users.
Those are the only two logically possible things.
Going to the user's location,
now, in a pandemic situation,
this can be slightly harder, and you can do it
with some video visits and so forth.
The general point is you go to their location,
and that's different than we get them to us,
and we ask them to perform tasks,
and we see whether they can do the things
that we want people to do, which is very important.
But, it's also very important
to see how people live and how they work,
and their workspace or their living environment,
their home environment.
I think you get a different type
of information from field studies.
Then you come to these twists on it,
but to me, honestly, that's a smaller point.
One option is that you do it
as a true ethnographic study,
which is to say you kinda live with the people,
and that, of course, we don't really do.
It's very rare that we would say
we will go an embed ourselves, for a month,
or a year, or something like that,
with some users and just basically
live their lives and see how they behave.
I'm sure that a lot of good things
could be learned from that,
but it's rare that we do it.
Contextual inquiry, that's kind of what,
inquiry implies asking questions,
and so, one of the twists in methodology is
that you can either do pure observation
or you can also ask people questions.
The questions can either be
from a set list of questions,
as various people have defined various lists,
and they're all, or many of them anyway, are good lists.
All you can mold to be more clarifying questions.
So those are some twists and variants
on the general idea of field studies.
I do wanna say though that, to me,
the real reason we do field studies
is to go out and observe people
in their natural environment.
As little as we can intrude on that,
I think, the better.
To me, I prefer the variants where you ask
fewer questions, as opposed to the ones where you ask more.
If you just go out and do an interview,
you might as well do an interview
in various other ways.
Watching people is, to me, the extra value add.
It's a lot of hassle to drag yourself out
to all of these different locations.
One of the benefits of,
the key benefit of that is that observation.
That would be my recommendation, would be to,
first of all, to do it, because that's a lot
of extra value that you get from being
at customer's location and seeing how they work.
Secondly, to preferably do it
as much observational as you can
and as little questioning as you can,
but there will have to be some follow-up questions.
If you're just sitting there with people
for one, two, whatever number of hours,
you will have some questions for them after that.
That, I think, is fine as well.
But to return to the question, I really think that
there's subtle distinctions between various variants,
but that's not really the important point.
The important point is the big distinction
between a lab study and field study,
going to the customer.
So do that, and mainly stay quiet.