5 things you can do on a site visit, other than watching tasks

Site visits (aka Contextual Inquiry) are an amazingly rich source for customer understanding. We typically go on site visits when we are trying to understand how people are accomplishing tasks now (whether it is with our software or something else), what their main pain-points are in a given area, opportunities for innovation, inspiration, and to gain a better understanding of our customers.

Certainly, the best interactions with participants are when they show us their processes and talk about their issues. However, there are times when it can be difficult to get customers to give us those rich experiences. For example, sometimes participants don't think their process is important or interesting. Here are a few techniques to try that can kick start richer conversations and a deeper understanding of the people you visit:

Desk surface Inventory - Where does your participant use their computer? Do they have a desk? If so, take a look at the surface of the desk. What is there? When people pile up papers or items, or stick post-it notes to their monitor, they are trying to save some piece of information for some reason. Usually, things on a desk are considered things that the participant needs to pay attention to or remember. Have them walk you through the objects and papers on their desk. What are the objects? Why are they there? Get into this discussion with your customer. It might open up a window for further exploration and insights.

"Desktop" Inventory - When looking at your participant's computer, what does their computer screen tell you? Files that people leave on the computer screen "desktop" can be left for a number of reasons; these are often files that the customer isn't ready to file, needs to remember for some period of time, or used for "working" space. Much like the desk surface inventory, understanding what people leave on their computer desktops can give you insights and open the door for deeper discussions. What does the desktop background look like? Do they have a picture? If so, ask them about it. Have them walk you through each of the icons on the desktop and tell you what they are, what they use it for and maybe when was they used the file last.

Take a tour - have them walk you around the site and explain it to you. This works really well as an ice-breaker at the beginning of a visit. Sometimes, people are somewhat disconcerted by this request. Just reassure them that you are interested in knowing a little more about them (or their business). Have them show you around and take note of the things you see and what they tell you about the person. Ask your participant what they use things for, or how often they use a space. For example, if the participant shows you their formal dining room, you could ask them about when they used the room last and why. You never know what these types of tours might reveal to you about the person. You can expect to get clues to their values, the importance of various things that they use, and gain some color to better understand your participant. This activity also tends to set a good context for the site visit participants because it makes it clear that we are there to learn from them.

A day in your life - have the participant walk you through their typical day. You can map this out as a timeline of activities, or as a map of where the person is in their space throughout the day. If the participant usually comes into the office in the morning, grabs coffee from the kitchenette, goes to their computer and checks email, walks to the FAX machine to check for incoming orders, then to the store room to pull items from inventory... well that might be pretty interesting. Seeing how people are moving through their site and what they are trying to accomplish can give you insights into how to streamline processes, unveil hidden pain-points or opportunities to delight. It is really great to take advantage of being in their site to see how they use it.

Show me something - A fun activity to try as an icebreaker that can give you ideas about what your customer values, likes and dislikes, is to have them identify various things in their environment that reflects those values. Tell the person to think about things in the site, including on their computer. Then ask them to show you things. Ask them to show you something: "frustrating", "fun", "important", "painful", "delightful", "challenging", "unique" or other terms. With each thing, have them explain it to you and why they chose that. For example, if you ask the participant to show you something "fun" and they show you a golf club, ask them why they identified it as fun... you might learn that one of their passions is golf, that they spend every Thursday afternoon playing, and that they are getting ready to participate in a local competition. This information can help you better understand your participant, but can also help you build a relationship that might encourage them to share more with you as the session proceeds. You can tailor this activity around the thing you are interested in studying. For example, if you are studying payroll customers, you might do this activity around payroll. "Show me something important about payroll", "Show me something fun about payroll"... you might stumble across something really interesting!

These are just a handful of ideas of additional things you can do in addition to watching tasks. Please share your ideas with me!

Lessons from a friends and family photo diary study

I was pretty excited about the concept of photo diary studies, but I wanted to get a feel for what it was like to run one, and what type of information I could expect to find out. So, I decided to run one with friends and family. I felt sure that I could get my family members to play along.

Logistics:

• I did a “call” for participants via email and family blog. I had 8 people reply that they were interested.


• I came up with a list of 15 activities. I tried to have them range from vague to concrete. I split the activities up into three weeks, to see whether I could maintain participation for that long.

Here was the list:

• Week 1 Activities:
  1. “This is me”
  2. "Who I am" - Take a picture that tells me who you are (anything that reflects your values, beliefs, personality or other….) and describe it for me
  3. "Past" - Take a picture that represents your past
  4. "Future" - Take a picture that represents your future
  5. "Frustrating" - Take a picture of something you find frustrating
  6. "Delightful" - Take a picture of something you find delightful
  7. "Fun" - Take a picture of something fun
  
• Week 2 Activities
  1. “Morning” - Take a sequence of at least 4 pictures representing your morning routine
  2. “Family” - Take a picture of someone in your life that you consider to be family
  3. “Desk” - Take a picture of your desk (or where you work, use your computer, etc)
  4. “Shopping” - Take a picture the next time you are shopping and describe where you are, what you are doing, and why
  5. “Challenge” - Take a picture representing your biggest challenge
  6. “Loud” - Take a picture of something loud
  7. “Life” - Take a picture that represents something you would like to do with your life
  
• Week 3 Activity (final week!)
  1. “Day” - Pick a day and take pictures throughout the day to document your day. Describe what went well and what didn’t go well during this day (include pictures, if you can).
  

How it worked out
Actual participation was much worse than expected. Of the 8 participants:

• Two participants didn’t post anything at all


• One participant only posted the “This is me” photo


• One participant only posted activities 2-5 on week 1


• One participant did the first 2 weeks, but not the last


• Three participants did all of the activities

Some technical challenges came up:

• One participant couldn’t upload her pictures because they were too large


• One participant had some goofs with uploading a few pictures (where she uploaded the wrong ones and then couldn’t figure out how to edit the entries, so she just sent duplicates)

All of the participants used existing photos as well as taking photos for the study. What surprised me what the proportion of photos that were “pre-existing”. Of the 123 images submitted, 40 pictures were clearly existing images that were uploaded.

Since I knew these people, I was in a unique position to understand the pictures and how accurate a picture of each participant was conveyed by the images and content. I felt that the overall representations were fairly accurate, although quite limited.

The best pictures came from very concrete tasks:

• Desk


• Morning


• Day
  

I liked these images… people seemed to GET INTO it and they gave a wide variety of images and interpretations:

• Challenge


• Frustrating


• Loud

The least useful were the tasks that were trying to get at who the person was. These elicited more anxiety in the participants, then revealed very predictable images having to do with parenting, etc:

• Who I am


• Past


• Future


• Life


• Family

Wrap-up
Overall, I was happy with what I’d learned from the study. I learned that the logistics of setting up and encouraging participation were pretty time consuming, but that the joy of getting people’s images made it all worthwhile. I think these types of studies might be useful for giving us a picture of what customers are like in different parts of the country (and/or world), but that it limits our view so much that it cannot be used in place of actually going there in person. I also learned that it would be very difficult to get people to really document something that they are doing on a regular basis. Once, perhaps… but not many times. For example, this really wouldn’t work if we asked someone to take a picture of what they were doing each time they logged into email for a couple of weeks.

Deep Understandings

Coming soon to a blog near you... Wendy's thoughts on gaining deep understandings.