Contextual Research

Learn how to conduct UX research and synthesize the findings to make a problem statement.

Overview

How to research users in their context? This HCI University project allowed me to put my interviewing and qualitative data analysis skills into practice by interviewing senior year students about "How do they plan and work on their bachelor or master thesis?"

Goals

To identify the workflow and potential opportunities to improve the lives of senior students.  To immerse yourself with contextual inquiry practices and user research methods 

Role

UX Researcher -
Univesity of Zürich

Area

User Research - Contextual Interview, Discovery, & Ideation

Team

5 students

Duration

Sept - Oct 2017

Client

Empathize

Kicking off with the brainstorming session to formulate a selection of questions and designing a protocol for the coming interview sessions. The main challenge was to formulate questions in an open-minded way that will yield answers as insightful as possible. The focus during the interview should not only be to dig deep into someone's routine but also to gather a broad understanding of which problems arise.

Qualitative Interviews

During the initial discovery phase,  I interviewed people of age groups between 23-30 years, with diverse backgrounds to understand their approach to plan and organize their thesis.

• What is the main communication medium in your Thesis? How frequent is the communication? 
  "In my group, actually there isn't too much communication, the professor doesn't answer my emails. Let's say that with the prof. it's like once every couple of months. With Ph.D. and Post Doc supervisor that are actually following me, we try to do once a week. With them, there is also no communication"
  Emily 28 yrs, Master Student

• How do you organize long-term time management? 
  "My project had no fixed stuff. They never gave me written tasks. Without this, it is difficult to manage time in the long term"
  George 29 yrs, Master Student

Transcription

The next step was to selectively transcribe the results that I conducted. I used notes to narrow down interesting section that yields insights about how the interviewee ("R4" in transcription) working on her thesis 

During the transcription, I had come up with additional insights or ideas that I annotated on a separate piece of sticky notes, one insight per sticky note is a good practice.

Conclusion: The process helped me understand the student's point of view and individuated the critical parts of their workflow. 

One of the biggest challenges with Emily was to communicate with her thesis supervisor. 

Interpretation & Affinity Diagramming

Later, the whole team clustered all our notes from the contextual inquiries into an affinity diagram. This method is an exciting way to organize your data after it's collected into patterns, insights, and digestible tidbits. The end goal is to come up with a visual representation of the user's pain-points, desires, and goals.

The next step was to add a category sticky note to represent each group, which helped to segment ideas in different groups. The process made me realize how the workflow of each student was different in the details, yet very similar on a high level. 

The detail is elaborated on the sticky note with the number linking to the line in the transcript is shared by other interviewees. 

Synthesizing insights & Storyboarding

What do we do with the Affinity diagram? From the diagram, the team narrowed down the findings to a list of high-level categories. The three that best reflected the senior students resulting from our contextual inquiry : 

1. Workspaces strongly influence the productivity of students
2. Time management plays a fundamental role in the success of a thesis
3. Computer screens are not adequate, they cause fatigue and are suboptimal for laboratory work

1. Workspaces

3. Computer screens are not adequate

2. Time Management

Key Takeaways

The project ended successfully with framing the workflow of students writing a thesis and storyboarding it. Three problematic points were individuated: Workspaces, Time management, and digital screens. 

Additionally, the digital systems are prohibited in the laboratory, which was cumbersome to match the analog and digital data frequently to finalize the experiment data for their thesis. It was difficult to manage data, workflow which misleads to communicate with the professor to discuss the deadlines. 

Those are at the same time three opportunities for improving their lives on which we will work in a future part of the class. The project enlightened me about how important context is when one strives to really understand people. This influenced how I think and approach user research nowadays. 

Let's connect
Get in touch for opportunities or just to say hi!