The Ethnographic Observations Have Begun

By leelefever on June 9, 2004 - 8:44am.

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• Online Usability
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As you may know, I’m working with a team to improve distributed learning at a big ‘ole company that shall remain nameless. For this phase of the project, we’re using contextual inquiry as a way to understand the future users, which should help us make usable online products for them.

We are in full-on observe and debrief mode right now. We observe people for a day and then debrief the next. During the debrief, we build models that represent the person’s context- their attitudes, tasks, interactions and physical environment. It’s been quite the experience learning how to build these models and how to gather data on someone in a way that informs the models. I'm getting better, but have a way to go.

Luckily, we have an expert on the team to keep us in line. I have faith that this process will be essential in building usable and useful web-based learning products. I don’t how we could get a more accurate picture of the real world of these folks... and the real world is the only world that matters.

We’ve heard people say this more than once. “OK, go ahead and watch, but I’m warning you… it’s going to be like watching paint dry.” Of course, our response is, “Well, if you want to improve paint, watching it dry is necessary.”