Six Circles - An Experience Design Framework

UIE Reports Fundamentals Series
the field study handbook:

Common Sense
a
Approach for
Discovering User Needs
Kate Gomoll
Ellen Story Church
Eric Bond
User
Interface
Engineering
User Interface Engineering 510 Turnpike Street, Suite 102 North Andover, MA 01845 (978) 327-5561 or (800) 588-9855 www.uie.com
The Field Study Handbook:
A Common Sense Approach for Discovering User Needs
UIE Fundamentals Reports
There are many ways to study how people interact with web sites or other types of designs.
Whether you prefer usability testing, field studies, focus groups, or some other approach, UIE
Fundamentals reports will get you up and running.
These reports distill many years of usability consulting into tips and strategies you can use
with confidence. In The Field Study Handbook: A Common Sense Approach for Discovering
User Needs, the authors summarize the key steps involved in a field study, including up-front
planning, the site visit, and data analysis.

Written By: Kate Gomoll

Ellen Story Church
Eric Bond
Published By: User Interface Engineering

510 Turnpike Street, Suite 102
North Andover, MA 01845
(978) 327-5561
www.uie.com
Cover Design: Laura Spindler

www.spindlerdesign.com
Copyright © 2007, User Interface Engineering. All rights reserved.
This report is protected by copyright laws. Reproduction is not permitted, except when the
licensee has purchased a group license, which allows duplication for other members of the
licensee’s organization and storage on the organization’s intranet.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
i i www.uie.com ©2007 User Interface Engineering. Reproduction Prohibited

A Common Sense Approach for Discovering User Needs Table of Contents
Table of Contents
Chapter 1: Field Studies Overview

Where field research fits....................................................................................................................................... 1
Why field research is important........................................................................................................................... 1
The field study process......................................................................................................................................... 2
The philosophy...................................................................................................................................................... 2
Chapter 2: Planning Your Field Study

Get Buy-In............................................................................................................................................................ 5
Selecting the right project............................................................................................................................ 5
Convincing management............................................................................................................................. 6
Defining requirements.................................................................................................................................. 7
Changing the scheduling process............................................................................................................... 7
Building multidisciplinary design teams.................................................................................................... 8
Gaining visibility........................................................................................................................................... 8
Develop the Study Plan.................................................................................................................................... 9
Assembling your team.................................................................................................................................. 9
Understanding the domain........................................................................................................................ 12
Knowing your audience............................................................................................................................. 13
Determining user groups............................................................................................................................ 14
Developing a screener................................................................................................................................ 16
Predicting timeline and cost...................................................................................................................... 16
Finding people to study.............................................................................................................................. 17
Determining participant incentives.......................................................................................................... 18
Identifying the work.................................................................................................................................... 18
Create the Materials........................................................................................................................................ 20
Developing forms and surveys.................................................................................................................. 20
Stocking your travel bag............................................................................................................................. 26
Setting up the visits..................................................................................................................................... 27
Chapter 3: The Site Visit

Conduct Observations and Interviews...................................................................................................... 30
Managing the visit....................................................................................................................................... 30
Interviewing participants........................................................................................................................... 34
Observing tasks........................................................................................................................................... 35
Observing the environment....................................................................................................................... 38
Capturing it all............................................................................................................................................. 38
Filling in the gaps........................................................................................................................................ 41
Write Site Reports............................................................................................................................................ 42
Preparing for analysis................................................................................................................................. 43
Sharing the visit data.................................................................................................................................. 44
Chapter 4: Analyzing the Data

Analysis Process............................................................................................................................................... 47
Analysis activities........................................................................................................................................ 47
A process for large projects........................................................................................................................ 49
©2007 User Interface Engineering. Reproduction Prohibited www.uie.com ii

A Common Sense Approach for Discovering User Needs Table of Contents
A process for small projects....................................................................................................................... 50

Organize Data and Illustrate Findings....................................................................................................... 51
Communicating the big picture................................................................................................................ 51
Working with the data................................................................................................................................. 54
Showing the details of individual tasks.................................................................................................... 55
Analyzing task rankings.............................................................................................................................. 57
Selecting visual techniques....................................................................................................................... 58
Validating “what is”...................................................................................................................................... 59
Identify Opportunities and Make Recommendations........................................................................... 60
Identifying improvement opportunities................................................................................................... 60
Illustrating improvement ideas.................................................................................................................. 61
Documenting recommendations.............................................................................................................. 62
Validating “what could be”.......................................................................................................................... 64
Communicate Results..................................................................................................................................... 65
Consolidating your materials..................................................................................................................... 65
Promoting your work.................................................................................................................................. 66
Conducting additional research................................................................................................................ 67
A Final Word..................................................................................................................................................... 67
Chapter 5: Appendix
References & Bibliography................................................................................................................................. 69
Phone screener................................................................................................................................................... 70
Recruiting script.................................................................................................................................................. 72
Demographics questionnaire............................................................................................................................ 74
Informed consent form...................................................................................................................................... 77
Interview & observation script........................................................................................................................... 78
Task Survey - Importance................................................................................................................................... 85
Task Survey - Frequency..................................................................................................................................... 86
Satisfaction survey.............................................................................................................................................. 87
Observation notes............................................................................................................................................... 88
Audio diary instructions..................................................................................................................................... 89
Follow-up interview............................................................................................................................................ 90
Letter to site contacts.......................................................................................................................................... 91
Incremental site report....................................................................................................................................... 92
A “Day In the Life” scenario................................................................................................................................ 98
Storyboard of the scenario............................................................................................................................... 100
Photo storyboard.............................................................................................................................................. 103
Top ten tasks...................................................................................................................................................... 105
Sum of inverses................................................................................................................................................. 106
Timelines............................................................................................................................................................ 107
About the Authors

Author Biographies........................................................................................................................................... 109
iii iii www.uie.com ©2007 User Interface Engineering. Reproduction Prohibited


Additional Resources
We are pleased to provide you with electronic

versions of all samples and forms at
http://www.uie.com/handouts/reports/field_study_handbook/
The Field Study Handbook Samples:
• Screener for qualifying participants

• Recruiting script
• Demographic questionnaire
• Voluntary participation, video/photo release, non-disclosure form
• Interview scripts (manager and participant)
• Task ranking surveys
• Satisfaction survey
• Observation notes
• Audio diary instructions
• Follow-up interview
• Letter to site contacts
• Incremental site report
• A “day in the life” scenario
• Storyboard of the scenario
• Photo storyboard
• Top ten tasks
• Sum of inverses
• Timelines
You can access the forms and get started with your field research at:
http://www.uie.com/handouts/reports/field_study_handbook/
©2007 User Interface Engineering. Reproduction Prohibited iv

www.uie.com iv
chapter one:
field studies overview
A Common Sense Approach for Discovering User Needs Field Studies Overview
Field Studies Overview

Field research is part of a larger process called user-centered design. We’ll start this report
with a brief discussion of where field research fits in the user-centered design process and
why it’s so important to the process.
Where field research fits
At a high level, user-centered design has the following steps. Field research is most effective
in the requirements phase, before design:
• Gather Requirements – Conduct up-front field studies and gather existing data to
understand the users’ environment, goals, and specific tasks.
• Design – Match the users’ skills and tasks to an overall conceptual model that
can support the work in a user interface. Use rapid prototyping techniques and
interdisciplinary design teams to quickly and iteratively develop the model.
• Test – Evaluate the model through usability reviews and testing.
• Iterate – Use the evaluation results to revise the design, repeating the previous steps as
necessary.
Why field research is important
A solid research phase is critical to the success of the entire user-centered design process.
In fact, these early activities are the most important part of the process because this is where
you learn about users and their work. If you skip field research, you run the risk of basing
your designs on faulty assumptions about users and their goals and tasks, rather than from
data.
In later stages of the user-centered design process—especially usability testing—the focus

will be on the product you have developed to support users and their work. That product
focus is appropriate in the later steps because those steps aim to improve your design. But to
design the best product from the start, you need to know, in depth, the work you are trying to
support, the environment the work takes place in, and the people who do the work.
www.uie.com ©2007 User Interface Engineering. Reproduction Prohibited

The field study process
Below is the overall process for conducting field studies.
Field Study Planning – Making sure you understand the business domain, the target
audience for the product, and the research team.
• Get buy-In
• Develop the study plan
• Create the materials
The Site Visits – Watching users do their work in their environment, and capturing the
details of the tasks, the environment, and the experience.
• Conduct observations and interviews

• Write site visit reports
Analysis – Making sense of the things you gathered and experienced, aiming for an
accurate record of “what is,” and brainstorming about “what could be.”
• Organize the data

• Extract key findings
• Identify opportunities
• Communicate results
The philosophy
Threaded throughout this process is a philosophy of pragmatism:
• Be flexible in your methods. For example, while you might want to videotape
that consultation between a financial planner and her customer, privacy issues
might make you settle for role-playing.
• A little can go a long way. You don’t need to study every task in detail if you are
selective in what you do study. Concentrating on the frequent and important tasks is
the best place to start.
• Quantify what’s quantifiable. If you plan ahead, you can collect quite a
bit of quantifiable information on your field visit. You’ll want to gather detailed
demographic data, task rankings, and satisfaction ratings.
©2007 User Interface Engineering. Reproduction Prohibited www.uie.com

• Respect the experiential. Remember, not all of your data requires a (pseudo)
scientific treatment. There’s a lot of value in just experiencing the user’s workplace.
Be sure to write “stories” about each of your visits, to capture (and share) the
environment and the experience.
Our Philosophy in Action
You never know what you will encounter out in the field, so you need to be
ready to think on your feet and shift things around:
At Gomoll Research & Design, we were conducting field research for the redesign
of a contact management system. We had carefully selected our sites, received
permission from the primary contacts, and briefed them on what we would be
doing. In other words, we covered all of our bases before the site visits. On one of
our key visits, however, we arrived at the site and discovered that our key contact
was out sick and nobody knew who we were or why we were visiting. We had to
think quickly and figure out how to salvage the visit. Using our great powers of
persuasion and our way with people, we managed to arrange interviews and mini-
usability studies with a couple of employees. We weren’t able to gather the exact
data we had hoped for, but we came away with some useful data that became part
of our research results.

chapter two:
planning your
field study
A Common Sense Approach for Discovering User Needs Planning Your Field Study
Get Buy-In
You’re probably wondering how you’re going to convince your organization that field
research is a good idea. Field research often requires more up-front analysis than most
organizations normally schedule.
Selecting the right project
Most likely, you can’t conduct field research for every project. Therefore, it’s important to be
selective about the projects you choose for field studies. Think about how the data will be
used, and the broad impact it can have.
Perhaps the best way to make sure that people understand the relevance and the need for
field research is to select a good project to use as a case study. If you can document the
process you’ve used and publicize the results, you will gain more support for conducting
field research on other projects in the future. Here are some key factors to consider when
you’re deciding which project—and product—to use as your case study:
• The product is new or ready for changes. You’ll probably meet the least resistance
when working on a product that is meant to be different. This is also where the field
research results can have the biggest impact. Try to find a product that seems ripe for
change or innovation.
• You have some project ownership. For your first case study, it makes sense to select
a project that you have some control over. Even if it’s a small project, it will be important
that you (or someone else who has experience with user-centered design) can make
most of the decisions.
• Customers want the product. If your customers are asking for a new or redesigned
product, you’ll be in a better position to ask those customers for help in evaluating the
different designs, user models, and task descriptions you develop.
• Management wants the product. It’s beneficial if your management is behind a

product effort. Just make sure they’re also behind the idea of field research. You don’t
want to get in the situation of having to apologize for conducting research.
• The project has visibility. Select a project that most people in the organization will
see as familiar and important. However, it’s advisable that your first attempt should
probably not be on a mission-critical project.
• The project is manageable. Although you want to select a project that people see as
important, you also want to make sure it is small enough in scope that you can try the
process and see some results rather quickly.

• There is little organizational resistance. If you have a choice, consider working

on a project that already has some support for field research. If that’s not possible, try to
find a project where the stakeholders wouldn’t be resistant to the idea.
• It’s possible to identify, contact, and travel to users. It’s easier to conduct timely,
effective research if you can get to your field sites efficiently.
Convincing management
You’ll most likely need to get management buy-in before your first field study, and of course
you’ll need to do some convincing if you want to make room for field research in your
design and development process. Here are some sound arguments that often prove helpful:
• Base the design on user data, rather than assumptions. Perhaps the primary
benefit of field research is it gives the designers the confidence that they are designing
for true user goals and tasks, not just assumptions about what those might be.
• The competition is using these techniques. These techniques are not new. They
have been around in the field of research psychology for decades. In the computer
industry, their use is not as entrenched, but almost all major software companies
conduct field research of some kind.
• Customers are demanding usable software. Most people understand that if they
have trouble using a software product, it’s probably because of poor product design.
Customers are moving away from the idea that they need to “learn the computer,” and
they’re demanding ease of use.
• People are becoming discretionary users. Because the competition is so fierce,

users can decide not to use a product that doesn’t work well. There are fewer and fewer
situations where users have no choice but to use the software put in front of them. For
example, many users can—and do—simply buy an off-the-shelf product if they don’t like
the one supplied by their organization.
• This approach saves time and money. It may be difficult to quantify the savings
achieved by using field research techniques, but there are some useful measures:
• Support calls
• Training
• Costly redesign
• Lost sales
• Errors
If you track these types of expenses before and after a case study, you’ll undoubtedly put
together a convincing argument for the cost-effectiveness of the techniques.

Training Time Significantly Reduced

During the design phase of a redesigned financial software product for banks, the training
team began designing the training program for the newly designed software. The training
program required 6 days of classroom training on site at the banks for the old software
product. The lead trainer excitedly informed the software design team that she anticipated
only 6 hours of on-site classroom training for the redesigned product! That translated to a
large savings in bankers’ time, trainers’ time, as well as travel expenses for the trainers.
Defining requirements
Conducting field research is an excellent way to define user requirements. It yields the user
goals, task scenarios, work environment, and use cases needed to do the job well. Once
you’ve convinced yourself and your management that field research makes sense, you’ll
want to make the process more standard in your organization. A good way to do that is to
expand the process that’s already in place. For example, most companies already require a
Functional Requirements Specification for any new product. By adding a User Experience
Specification and/or a Human Interface Specification, you can convey the importance of
product usability to developers. Your specification could include:
• Field research results

• Scenarios
• Storyboards
• Prototypes
If you deliver all these things with your specification, developers will have a much better
idea of how the product is meant to function—from the user’s point of view.
Changing the scheduling process
The field research process requires changes to the typical product development schedule.
You’ll need to allocate time at the beginning of the project to plan and carry out the field
research. Then, you’ll need to add a data analysis phase, as well as time to create prototypes.
If your organization hasn’t been involving users in the design process, these changes may be
quite significant.
How can you make the case for schedule changes? It will be a difficult argument unless you
have tried the process on a single project and have shown how it improves results without
slowing down the overall schedule significantly. When we’re selling the concept of schedule
changes, we like to use the slogan, “Pay me now or pay me later!” Basically, we’re saying that
time spent doing good up-front research and design will pay off later in the process because
there won’t be as many costly re-works, support calls, training issues, etc.

Building multidisciplinary design teams
The field research process—and the larger design process—works best when people from
different disciplines and backgrounds work together. That’s because a group of diverse
people is much more likely to come up with innovative approaches to problems and to look
at issues from more than one angle. When you’re building your overall team, look for people
with varied backgrounds such as:
• Psychology
• Graphic design
• Programming
• Writing
• Anthropology
• Sociology
• Animation
• Multimedia
• Instructional design
• Prototyping
• Industrial design
• The domain appropriate to your product
In a later section, we’ll tell you more about the types of team members you’ll want to take on
your field visits. Keep in mind, though, that you can benefit from additional team members
to help plan the visits, analyze the data collected—and eventually move toward design.
Gaining visibility
Here are some pointers for gaining the visibility you’ll need to make this process fly:
• Include key stakeholders in the field visits. If you know there are certain
people who will make or break the success of the project, make sure you invite
them to observe at least one of the site visits. The experience of seeing users in
action will most likely be the impetus you need to get these stakeholders interested.
And, once they’re interested, they’ll start spreading the word for you.
• Make presentations. Use the data you gather to expose as many people as
possible to the results of the field studies. Use posters, stories, photographs, etc. to
help people to understand and remember the users you visited.

• Present photos, video, and/or audio. One of the very best ways to impress
people with the importance of a design decision is to present audio or video clips
of real people experiencing real difficulties. These excerpts invariably spur teams
into action. (Most people are very anxious to do what they can to “relieve human
suffering.”)
• Show prototypes as soon as you can—but present the research first. As

soon as you have a functioning prototype, you’ll want to begin your “road shows.”
These frequent presentations will get your project and your new process into
people’s minds. Be sure to present the field research before you show the prototype.
This will ground your audience, and help them to understand how you designed
from user data, not assumptions.
Develop the Study Plan

Before you conduct a field study, it is necessary to do some research and put together your
team and your plan. The tasks you need to complete include:
1. Assembling your team

2. Understanding the domain
3. Knowing your audience
4. Determining user groups
5. Predicting the timeline and cost
6. Finding people to study
7. Determining participant incentives
8. Identifying the work
Assembling your team
Field research is truly a team activity. Not only are there a number of activities to perform,
but a variety of skills are needed. Part of your purpose is to expose members of the design
team to users, their work, and their environment. This exposure will help the design and it
will help establish buy-in to the user-centered design process. Site visits always enlighten.
And, as we’ll discuss later, each team member will bring an individual view to the data
gathering and analysis phases of the field research process, which will greatly enrich your
findings. Here are some of the people you might ask to participate in the field research:

• Domain expert – The domain expert helps the research team to interpret what
they see.
• Software engineers or web site developers – The software engineers and

web developers need to see their users first-hand, in context. Most engineers and
developers find field visits quite enlightening.
• Interface designer – Of course, the user interface designers need to be very much
involved. Most likely, they have helped to plan and carry out the studies.
• Product manager – The product manager must believe site visits are important.
It’s a good idea to invite your product manager on one or more visit.
• Technical writer – Consider including a technical writer on your research and

design team. The primary reason is to provide the writer with direct exposure
to customers, which is vital for producing quality documentation. (If you care
about the users’ experience with the software, you had better be concerned with
how good the documentation and training material is.) A writer also can be very
valuable throughout the field research process: helping to create a non-biased
survey, contributing a unique view of the users’ work, and exploring ways to
represent research findings.
• Product marketer – Product marketers can be very good allies for field
researchers. They usually have databases of potential participants, as well as
established relationships with user groups. They should understand the target
market, and they will have an interest in the outcome of the research. Leverage with
the product marketers as much as you can.
How many people should be on the team?

The research team is the set of people who develop the plan, carry out the research, and
present the results. This team can be composed of more people than would actually attend
each site visit, but the team shouldn’t be so large that it’s difficult to make decisions and
move ahead. In our experience, research teams of six to eight people work well.
©2007 User Interface Engineering. Reproduction Prohibited www.uie.com 10

How many people should attend each site visit?

The number of people you take along on a site visit depends very much upon the
environment of the site. For example, if you’re visiting a corporation where most of the
people sit in cubicles, you’ll want to make sure that a maximum of two observers visit any
one person. Sometimes even two observers are too many. Those cubicles can be mighty
cramped! Of course, you could bring a larger research team to the site, and then split up
into smaller groups to conduct the observations. (This is an efficient way to get through
more observations.) When you’re recruiting participants for your study, ask about the
environment. Try to determine how many people will fit comfortably, as well as what the
social situation might be like.
Always bring at least two observers when visiting participants in their homes. This is
important for your safety, as well as for perceived professionalism. Be very careful not to
bring too many observers on your visit. (We once made the mistake of allowing more team
members from our client company to join us on a home visit at the last minute. We ended
up parading up the steps of our participant’s house with a six-person research team! )
This was a big surprise to the participant. He was extremely put off by the number of people
who would be watching him and listening to him. It took us much longer than usual to
get him used to the idea and comfortable with the research. In the end, the large number
of people on the visit negatively affected our ability to collect data. We had to request
repeatedly that he actually show us how he used the product. He was reluctant to show us
anything, because so many people were scrutinizing his every move!
Team member roles

There should be a primary researcher on the project. This person is responsible for making
sure the study plan and site visit script are in order, and this person will also be attending
most—if not all—of the site visits, and doing most of the analysis work. If the study is large,
there may be two lead researchers who split the visits and collaborate on the analysis. Other
team members should observe and/or take video, audio, and photographs on the visits.
11 www.uie.com ©2007 User Interface Engineering. Reproduction Prohibited

Understanding the domain
You’ll want a good feel for the breadth of the users’ work so you can better understand the
demands on the users. You’ll need a comprehensive list of tasks so you can choose a subset
of tasks to observe. Using a subset makes the scope of your effort manageable, and, if you
select the most frequent and important tasks, your design solutions for the top few tasks
should generalize to the entire set of tasks.
If you are going to be working on an airline reservations system, how much do you need to
know about the airline reservations business before you go out into the field? The knowledge
you need can be broadly categorized as “terminology” and “trends.”
The terminology
Every business has its own lingo, and if you don’t know that lingo, it’s hard to keep up with
what happens in the workplace.
• Learn the basics. It’s a very real concern that if you don’t know enough about
the business you are studying, you can be overwhelmed when you get in the field,
causing you to spend so much time learning the basics that you miss the detail.
• Questions are OK, but avoid questions at the “noise level.” Distracting
questions that are too basic can cause you to end up with inadequate research. (Or,
you might be forced to make multiple trips to the field to find out what you need.
While there are lots of advantages to multiple trips, most of us don’t get that luxury,
nor is it necessarily economically sound.)
• Ask someone with domain knowledge to “interpret.” If you are new to the
content area you are studying, but you are working with a multidisciplinary design
team, you will probably want to keep your domain training to a minimum. First, you
don’t want to delay getting into the field if you have a domain expert on your team
who can be your “interpreter.” Second, your lack of knowledge can actually be an
advantage, because it allows you to maintain objectivity—a freshness of view on the
domain—that others on the team cannot provide.

The trends
Understanding the trends within the domain is everyone’s concern because these trends are
the underlying forces giving the project its initial shape. The team should be able to answer
questions like:
• Are there major trends in the industry? For example, is the customer service
job at the telephone company merging with the outbound sales job?
• What is the competition doing? For example, is your competition already

incorporating 3-D data visualization?
• Are there earlier versions of the product? If an earlier version of the product is
in use, what are some of the outstanding problems with it?
Some team members will know the answers to these questions because someone
else researched them and wrote them down. To discover trends in the domain you’re
studying, begin by consulting these sources.
• Market research results – Gather any available research that might help you
characterize your audience and the industry trends.
• Trade articles – Spend some time searching the Internet for related topics.
• Competitive analysis reports – These will help you understand how your
product or concept compares to the competition.
• Technical support centers – If your product, or an earlier version of the product,

is in use, you can gather some very useful information from technical support
centers.
Knowing your audience
Knowing your audience can be a chicken-and-egg kind of problem. You need to conduct
field research in order to understand your audience, and yet you need to have a good basic
understanding of the audience in order to select the appropriate people to visit.
Consider this: You are on a team that is redesigning a library-access system. Who are
your users? Professional researchers? Casual community users? Both? Is one group more
important than the other? Before you start your field visits, you’ll need to determine the
target audience. You might already know this information from project plans, or you might
be able to get the information from a marketing person. If you don’t have the information,
consider creating an initial survey to find out.

When you’re deciding which user groups to visit, try consulting:
• Project plans
• Marketing resources
• Competitive products
• Audience surveys
• Similar products or processes – If you are in the situation where your users don’t
exist (e.g., you are developing a first-generation product), you’ll want to identify
similar user populations that you will be able to study.
Determining user groups
Once you know the intended audience of your site or product, you’ll want to gather
quantifiable demographic information. You will use the demographic data to describe the
audience segments and to produce user profiles.
In general, you’ll want three to five participants in your study from each type of user group
you identify. You might base those groups on marketing segments, location, demographics,
job role, product usage, or by some other measure. Develop a matrix of the criteria, and
then get buy-in from stakeholders in the project. It’s important to get agreement on
the criteria for recruiting participants before doing the study. You don’t want key
stakeholders to question the validity of the user groups after the study is complete.
Use the matrix of criteria to recruit participants, but also save any demographic data
collected. When you go out to visit with your participants, you’ll want to gather additional
demographic data. In addition to giving you an overall feel for your audience, you’ll use
this information in later stages of the user-centered design process. In particular, this
information will help you select an appropriate conceptual model for your product and even
help you make some decisions about detailed design tradeoffs. For example, let’s say your
demographic information tells you the following things:
• Users have been in their current jobs for four years, on average.
• Sixty-five percent of users have no experience with a web site user interface.

This is important stuff to know! For example, let’s take the first finding: Say you are
developing software for people who will use your software every day, all day. If you know
that a job has a low turnover rate (and that the training cycle is relatively short), you might
be able to assume that at any given time the majority of your users will be experts in your
software. That being the case, when you are designing the interface, you will want a model
that supports/favors the expert user, possibly trading off some intuitiveness for speed and
power.
Sample Matrix
We will visit four sites of various sizes. Some will handle a relatively low work
volume and some will handle higher volume. The sites will be located throughout
the continental United States. We will work from the following list of sites to find
participants for this study:
Site Small Medium Large

Wisconsin X
California X
Georgia X
Connecticut X X
Arizona X X
Florida X X
At each site, we will interview managers. We will observe workers

in differing roles and ask interview questions as they perform their
work. We will meet with individuals in a variety of roles.
Workflow Participants
• Site Manager – Interviewed to understand the present and future program goals
for the site. What are the challenges facing the site? What are the successes of
the site?
• Role 1 – Interviewed to understand how work comes into the site and how it is
set up for processing.
• Role 2 – Interviewed to understand how the work is performed, what happens

at the end of this process, and how the work results are communicated.
• Role 3 – Interviewed to understand the data included, how it is stored, who uses
it, and how. Understand the level of detail needed for each part of the process.

Developing a Screener
The most common way to qualify participants for a study is to use a demographic screener.
Consider including questions that get at the following demographic information:
• Job role – “Describe your three most important responsibilities.”

• Age – “Indicate your age in the following ranges.”
• Work experience – “How long have you been in your current position?”
• Education – “Indicate the level of schooling you’ve completed.”
• Training – “Have you completed the one-week sales-training program?”
• Computer experience – “Mark the software programs that you use at least once a
week.”
In determining the content of the survey, try to envision what you will do with the data
from each question. You should have a good reason why you are asking for data. This
exercise will get you thinking about what you want to know, and it will help you identify
the questions that, if left in, might make your survey overly long and a burden to the
respondents. Still, don’t trim too much. Sometimes your “borderline” questions will yield
very interesting results or turn out to be more relevant than first thought. Make the most of
your opportunity.
Predicting timeline and cost
Use the matrix of user groups and sites

Use your matrix of user groups and sites to begin predicting the timeline and cost of
your study. Usually, research teams start out with too many criteria and too many user
groups. Spend time negotiating with your team to see where you can eliminate criteria
and combine groups, without sacrificing the goals of the study. Obviously, the more sites
and users you visit, the longer your study will take, and the more it will cost.
Leave time between visits to write site visit reports

When scheduling your site visits, be sure to leave adequate time to write site visit reports.
If you’re traveling to multiple cities for your visits, you will need to allow an equal
number of days for visiting and report writing.
• Rule of thumb: Visit time = Report writing time

For example, if you’re located in Milwaukee, and you need to schedule visits in
Texas and New York, you may want to schedule two to three days of visits in Texas,
followed by two to three days of writing time before you set out on the next round
of visits in New York. (For most corporate employees, this works out to a schedule
with one week of site visits, followed by one week writing—to accommodate travel,
meetings, and demands from other projects.)

Break the project into phases

To estimate cost, we break the project into five phases:
• Planning
• Site visits
• Site visit reports
• Analysis
• Presentation of results
We estimate the time for each phase and the number of people required, and then
multiply by an hourly rate. This gives us a good estimate for the project. If the total is
too high for the budget, we negotiate changes to the number of sites, the locations, or
the final report and presentation. (Frequently, clients ask us to skip the site visit reports
to save money. That’s something we can’t eliminate, however, because we have to
compile the results in order to do the analysis.)
Finding people to study
When you have a good idea of the types of people you want to study, you’ll need methods
for recruiting them. You’ll want to work with your sales and marketing departments to help
identify clients (or non-clients) who fit the profile that you are interested in. If your company
has its own user group, that might be a good resource for finding locations that fit the profile
and are willing to work with you. Another excellent option is beta sites, which come with
built-in willingness to participate. Here’s a list of possible sources:
• Marketing leads
• Customer registration databases
• Sales force leads
• Alpha and beta test sites
• People who bought competitors’ products
• Market research firms

Determining participant incentives
You’ll need to consider how you will compensate participants for agreeing to participate in
the field research. Depending on how invasive your study will be, the environment you’re
entering, and the motivation of participants, you will have different incentive plans.
1. Give participants something you know they want. For example:

• New versions of the product are often attractive.
• Money may be appropriate.
• Free service might be motivating.
• Free hardware may be appreciated. (For example, USB flash drives are popular and
not terribly expensive.)
2. Make sure management approves of the incentive. Be creative.
3. Give a gift to people who helped arrange the visits. The gift doesn’t need to be
extravagant—just enough to let them know you appreciate their efforts.
Identifying the work
As part of your planning process, you’ll need to understand the range of tasks users perform
with the product or process you’re studying. Then, you’ll want to determine which of those
tasks you will focus on when you conduct your observations.
You’ll want a good feel for the breadth of the users’ work so you can better understand the
demands on them. You’ll need a comprehensive list of tasks so you can develop a smaller,
prioritized set of tasks for your initial design work. Using a subset makes the scope of your
effort manageable, and, if you can identify and use the most frequent and important tasks,
your design solutions for the top few tasks should generalize to the entire set of tasks.
Cataloging the tasks

Here are some methods for developing a comprehensive list of tasks for users to rank:
• Ask domain experts. To catalog the tasks, you can often talk with the domain experts
on your team, asking them to produce a list from memory or from various sources
available to them.
• Use the product specification. You may be able to extract tasks from an existing
project specification. Even so, consider supplementing the list with field data.

• Conduct surveys or interviews. You can issue a survey, or you can conduct
interviews, over the phone or in person.
• Conduct “day in the life” studies. Another excellent technique is to spend a day at
a user site just following a user around—a “day in the life” study. This approach alone
won’t develop an exhaustive list of tasks—not everyone does every task every day—but
it will uncover some things that people forget or don’t consider, and it’s a wonderful way
to begin your immersion into the user’s world.
• Group resulting tasks into categories. Whatever approach you use, in addition to
listing tasks, have users and other experts help you group the tasks into categories. For
example, a customer-service representative might perform two dozen different tasks
that fall into the broad categories of “Providing information to customers about their
accounts,” “Making changes to existing accounts,” “Giving out information on products,”
and “Establishing new accounts.” When it comes time to choose the tasks that you are
going to focus on, your categorized list will help ensure that you have a representative
task for each major type of work the user performs.

Create the Materials

Before you schedule your first visit, you will need to develop all the forms and surveys you
will need, decide how you will compensate participants, schedule the visits, and pack your
travel bags.
Developing forms and surveys
During the planning process, you will need to create all the forms and questionnaires you
will be using throughout the study. It’s important to have note-taking aids like questionnaires,
if only to make sure that you remember to gather the information you’re most interested
in. But, be sure to keep those interviews and notes flexible. Because the field process is so
experiential, you’ll always hear and see unexpected things, and you’ll need to feel free to
add them to your notes. You’ll probably want to vary the order and timing of your questions,
too, depending on the situation. You can find all of the sample forms in the Appendix
of the report.
Here’s a list of forms and surveys for a typical field study:
Screener for qualifying participants

This is the list of key questions that determine
whether a person fits your target user profile.
Often this type of recruiting occurs over the
phone and may be done by a market research
firm. Ask the disqualifying questions first. Once a
person qualifies for the study, you might then ask
additional questions that match the person to a
particular group.
Figure 1a. Screener for qualifying participants

(Sample on page 70)

Recruiting script
If you are recruiting particular
businesses to participate, you’ll need
to explain what the study is and how
it will impact the daily work. In this
case, you might prepare a recruiting
script for the person who will contact
the businesses. The detailed screener
may not be necessary.
Figure 1b. Recruiting script

(Sample on page 72)
Demographic questionnaire
In addition to the screener
demographics, you may be interested
in other demographics so that you
can build a summarized profile of
your study participants. For example:
age range, years of experience,
years working at current job, type
of computer, screen resolution,
additional education, licenses,
certificates, etc. Collect only those
demographics that either help
you understand your audience, or
contribute to your product design.
Figure 2. Demographic questionnaire

(Sample on page 74)

Voluntary participation, video/photo release,

non-disclosure form
If you are audio recording or videotaping, you’ll
want to get the study participant’s permission
to record. If you are taking still photos, verbal
permission might be all you need, but consult
with your management and legal departments
to determine whether written permission is
required. The form should state that the person is
voluntarily participating in the study and grants
their permission to be recorded. The form should
also state that the recordings will be used only for
research and design purposes—not commercial
Figure 3. Voluntary participation, video/photo
release, non-disclosure form purposes. If you’ll be sharing any proprietary
(Sample on page 77)
information as part of the study, you’ll also want
to have the participant sign a non-disclosure
statement. All of this can be done in one form.
Interview script
This is your “game plan” for your meeting with
each study participant. List all of your interview
questions in the relative order that you will ask
them—typically starting with general questions
about the person and their job, and then
progressing to more detailed questions about the
job tasks and the tools used to complete those
tasks. The interview script also includes cues for
when to administer surveys and when to begin
observation. You might want to ask some general
questions before presenting a task survey, and
you might want to look at the results of the task
survey to determine which tasks to observe. Your
script can also include points to cover during
your introduction at the beginning of the visit and
closing points (including a thank-you) at the end.
Figure 4. Interview script

(manager and participant)
(Sample on page 78)

If you are visiting different types of users, you may have unique questions or surveys for
each group. Create a script for each user group. In a business environment, you’ll want
a separate script for the manager because you’ll ask different questions and probably
won’t do any observation of the manager. Ask questions about business goals and
measurement, the company’s competitive advantage, industry trends, etc.
Task-ranking survey
Once you’ve generated a list of tasks that your users might perform, create a form
for participants to rank those tasks in terms of frequency and importance. In large
organizations, you might want the manager to rank importance, and workers to rank
frequency. Comparing the responses can yield interesting results. In smaller companies
(or for home visits), you can have the user rank both importance and frequency. Those
tasks that are both important and frequent are the tasks that should be the easiest to
complete with your product.
Figure 5. Task-ranking for importance & frequency

(Samples on page 85-86)

Sometimes task ranking doesn’t make sense. For example, in a process where the tasks
are sequential, it doesn’t make sense to ask about importance and frequency. You might
consider a feature ranking survey instead. Have your users rank how frequently they use
particular features of your software or web site.
The ranking surveys are one way to get quantifiable (albeit self-reported) data to
supplement the experiential data you collect from observations. Determine what
information users can rank that will be useful to your project, and create a survey to
collect that data.
Satisfaction survey
Surveys that gauge satisfaction with a product
are often used in usability testing. Satisfaction
surveys can also be used in field studies to set
a benchmark. If you are working on a redesign
of an existing product, ask users to complete a
satisfaction survey for the current product. The
results will be a benchmark to beat with the
redesigned product. When you go to usability
testing on the redesigned product, administer
the survey again and see if the satisfaction score
changes.

Figure 6. Satisfaction survey
(Sample on page 87)
Note-taking form for observers

If you have a large team and you are bringing in
observers for only one or two visits to give them
exposure to the users, you may want to create a
note-taking form for them. Infrequent observers
may not be as familiar with the study plan as you
and the regular observers are. On the note-taking
form, indicate the kinds of things observers should
look for and make notes about. Also, leave lots of
blank space for them to record notes.
Figure 7. Note-taking form for observers

(Sample on page 88)


Logging forms for long-term studies

You may need to do a longitudinal study where
you gather data over a period of time. You’ll need
to leave some type of recording materials for your
users. You’ll need to determine if a recording
device, like a tape recorder, is best or whether
a paper form will do. Which format will fit best
into the user’s workflow? Make clear the types
of data you want the user to record, under what
conditions, and how often.
Figure 8. Logging forms for long-term studies

(Sample on page 89)
Follow-up questionnaire
When you do a longitudinal study, you’ll probably
want to follow up with an interview. It’s a good
idea to touch base with the study participant at
the end of the data collection period to debrief.
Prepare the list of questions you want answered.
You may conduct the interview in person or over
the phone depending upon where the user is
located and how well your schedules coordinate.
You may even decide that you can send an
electronic questionnaire. Like all the materials for
your study, determine the method that will work
best for the participant and yield the best quality
Figure 9. Follow-up questionnaire data for you.
(Sample on page 90)

Stocking your travel bag
As you travel around observing people, you’ll need to have all your materials handy. Usually,
on your first few visits, you’ll err on the side of bringing too much. However, you’ll quickly
learn to pare your bags down to the essentials.
If you have other observers traveling with you, make sure you provide copies of the materials
to each person, so they can follow along and take good notes.
Here’s a list of materials needed for most studies:
• Interview forms
• Business cards and corporate ID badge
• Data-gathering forms
• Non-disclosure form
• Audio recorder, tapes, and batteries
• Digital camera and batteries
• Vídeo camera, tapes, and tripod
• Extension cord
• Pens and clipboard
You might also consider bringing a laptop or notebook computer to take notes, but beware.
If you’re the primary researcher, don’t type the answers to your questions. This can make
participants very uneasy, and it’s difficult to make eye contact. Also, think about the space
constraints. When observing in a hospital, for example, there is usually no place to sit down,
let alone set a computer. Think about whether you’ll need to move around frequently during
the visit. You want to make sure your data gathering materials don’t keep you from missing
the action.

Setting up the visits
Before you go on site visits, you’ll need to arrange for the trip to go smoothly. Find a contact
person at each site, and explain your motivation for the trip. Emphasize how the data you
collect will help you with product development, be up-front about the level of disruption
users can expect, and dispel any fears of the research uncovering “problems” that will reflect
negatively on the users, their managers, or the corporation.
The contact person will help you with the following preparations:
• Getting managerial approval – Make sure participants’ managers know about and
approve the visit.
• Scheduling when the work is happening – You’ll need to conduct the visit during a
time when the work you want to observe will be happening. (Sometimes, this can make
the scheduling process difficult. Do your best to anticipate scheduling hitches, and find
some administrative help.)
• Identifying the people you will study – Usually, your contacts will want you to
talk with supervisors, managers, etc. You’ll need to assure them that you want to talk
with supervisory people, but you’re most interested in observing and speaking with the
people who use the product on a daily basis.
• Preparing people for your arrival – You might want to specifically ask the people
you are observing to prepare by saving typical tasks for the visit, collecting artifacts
ahead of time, and not cleaning their desks. You’ll also want them to understand that
the results of the observations and interviews will be kept anonymous.
• Sending a letter – Consider documenting your

arrangements and conditions in a letter. Include
details such as the date and time, the number of
people on your team, the individuals or roles you
expect to meet with, and the duration of each
individual meeting. If you are using recording
devices, reiterate how you will use the recordings.
Finally, be sure to call the site the day before to
make sure that everything is in order.
Figure 10. Letter to site contacts

(Sample on page 91)

Studies with individuals—not business sites

Some studies, like those involving consumer products, require you to find individuals who
may be doing the activity of interest in a variety of locations, so you won’t be going to a
particular place of business to find those individuals. An effective way to find individual
participants is to hire a market research firm to do your recruiting. These firms have
vast databases of people who are willing to participate in studies. If you do this, you will
definitely need to prepare a concise screener for the firm’s staff to use. The research firm will
take care of scheduling and should confirm with each individual just prior to the scheduled
visit. This will add to the cost of your study. Most firms charge per person for each individual
they schedule for your study.
Overlap of recruiting and planning

Finding study participants and scheduling visits takes time. Not only do you need to find
participants who match your target audience, but also you need to find people whose
schedules fit with your visit schedule. Begin recruiting as soon as you’ve finalized your
matrix of users—the characteristics of each user group, and the number of participants per
group. Hopefully, you’ll be able to assign someone the task of recruiting so you have time
to work on the rest of the study plan. You can work on the details of the interview script,
surveys, and other forms in parallel with the recruiting effort.

chapter three:
the site visit
A Common Sense Approach for Discovering User Needs The Site Visit
Conduct Observations and Interviews

Getting out into the field! This is what it is all about. This is where you really develop
your understanding of the users, their work, and their environment. That understanding
will be both experiential and analytic, and it will involve a mix of pure observation and
interviewing.
Managing the visit
You will learn so much about the user’s world simply by experiencing it first-hand. Ideally,
you just want to watch as people work. Follow them around, sit at people’s desks, see what
they see, and hear what they hear. Ask them to think aloud and explain their work, so you
can know their train of thought. If you never took a single note, your field research would
still be worthwhile for developing a degree of user empathy and some concrete memories of
real work performed by real people.
To get the most out of your time with study participants, however, you should approach the
visits with a plan. A plan will help you gather all the same data from all the participants. Here
are some considerations to make your visits successful.
• Have one person facilitate. It is a good idea to make a single team member
responsible for leading all the visits. This will help maintain consistency across all the
visits. It also helps put the participant at ease when they know who is “in charge” when a
team of people shows up to observe. In many cases, the person who planned the study
will be the lead for the visits. And, this person may be the entire study team! But, when
others go along on the visit either to help gather data, or to simply experience users for
themselves, be sure that someone close to the study planning is asking the interview
questions and guiding the observations.
• Establish protocol with observers. Sometimes you’ll want to include stakeholders

or other project team members on visits. Each individual might only go on one or two
visits, resulting in different observers on each visit you conduct. This is most common
for studies with many participants and high-profile studies where there are a lot of
stakeholders. Before arriving at the visit site, be sure to explain the visit protocol with
each observer. The typical protocol includes:

• Make it clear that the study facilitator will guide the activities of the visit and ask the
interview questions.
• If observers have follow-on questions that are in context of the current conversation,
they may ask those questions at that time.
• If observers have questions that are not in context of the current conversation,
they should hold those questions until the end of the visit. The facilitator will ask
observers if they have questions for the participant at the end of the visit.
• No one should offer help if the participant struggles with a task or the software to
complete that task. You can offer help once the visit is complete.
• Review the types of things the observers should be looking for and taking notes
about. If individual observers are assigned specific roles (like photographer), review
the assignment with them.
• Follow the script. One of the forms you created in the planning step is the interview
script. This form includes all the questions you want to ask the participants. Those
questions should be arranged in the general order in which you will ask them: high-
level to detailed. The script also includes notes for when to have the participant fill out
particular surveys in relation to the questions asked. For example, you’ll want the user
to fill out the demographic questionnaire early, after you’ve introduced the team and
explained the purpose of the visit, and the task survey after you’ve asked some general
questions about the user’s job and goals. You may want the task survey responses to
guide your observation, and then follow that with wrap-up questions.

Of course, there will be situations when you need to break from the script, but try to
keep the questions and observations on track with how the user typically performs work
tasks. Try to avoid going off on tangents so you can gather all the data your study plan
identifies.

• Warm up the users. Sometimes users aren’t ready to have you start looking over
their shoulders immediately. Spend some time introducing yourself, explaining what
you are doing and what they can expect. Let them know how long you expect to sit
with them and ask them if that is okay. Let them know how many surveys you’ll ask
them to fill out during the course of the interview. Let them know what types of things
you want to observe and where that activity will take place in relation to the interview.
Most importantly, reassure them that you are not there to evaluate them; rather you are
there to learn from them. One way to do that is to tell them they should treat you like an
apprentice. Get them talking, perhaps starting with, “How does a typical day begin for
you?”

• Watch the time. The amount of time you will need to observe a
user’s work will vary greatly depending on the nature of that work. Still, consider
keeping your visit with a single user to two hours. Being observed and interviewed can
be draining for users. Doing the interviewing and observation can also be draining for
you. You have to pay attention, learn how someone does their job, take notes, snap
pictures, and make sure you’ve captured all the data you need. If you need more time,
consider going home to absorb what you’ve seen and return on another day.
• Try tag-team interviewing. If you have two researchers on the visit, you can develop
a nice little routine for asking questions. One person can unpack the video equipment,
cameras, etc., while the other asks demographic questions and sets the participants
at ease. Then, as the visit progresses, watch each other and decide when to ask a
question. If you both have a copy of the interview script, you can see which questions
haven’t been asked yet. If you time them right, you can ask your interview questions as
people are working. The tricky part of this is to make sure you aren’t interrupting the
flow of what the participant is trying to do by asking an unrelated question, or missing
observations because you’re asking questions.
• Observe, don’t design. As you watch a user who is encountering problems or even
just using old technology, it is tempting to start thinking about redesigns. You can permit
yourself a quick note in your notebook, but don’t get off on a tangent. Stick to the
“what is” for now. Otherwise, you might end up with a collection of new designs but no
documentation of the issues that prompted them.
• Don’t offer help. It is natural to want to help a person navigate through software
when they are struggling—especially if you are very familiar with (or perhaps designed)
the software. However, the problem the user is having is critical data that you’ll want
to capture. You’ll want to understand what the user is trying to do, what the user is
thinking, and how the user resolves the problem. This information will be vital as you
work on new design solutions. Once the study session is over you can go back to the
problem task and show the user how to get around it.

• Expect the unexpected. This cliché works for field studies. When you observe people
in their natural context, you intend to see them with a fresh and accurate perspective.
And that means you’ll be looking for surprises. So, when you’re crafting those elegant
interview and observation forms, leave plenty of room for miscellaneous notes. Expect
that you will be asking questions that aren’t on the form, and try to think like an
anthropologist. You need to watch, listen, and be open to what you didn’t anticipate.
Observing the unexpected

We conducted a study of the setup and initial use of a
printer adapter that allowed people to print information
from their television-based web-surfing product. One
of the visits took us to the home of an elderly furniture
maker. He used this product in the den of his home
which was above his furniture store. To make himself
most comfortable while surfing the web from his couch,
he crafted a portable desk from an old stool, a wooden
tray, and a lamp.
Could this unexpected discovery inspire a supplementary

furniture line for the web-surfing software company?!
• Debrief with observers. If you have observers accompanying you on the visits, spend
some time after each visit discussing what you all just learned. You don’t have to spend
a lot of time, just a quick conversation, maybe over lunch or a cup of coffee before
your next session. Get everyone’s key impressions and takeaways. Also, arrange to get
any notes the observers took. You’ll want those when you write your site visit report.
Comparing your notes to theirs can be a great way to verify what you saw. Also, they
might have caught a detail that you missed.
• Travel in pairs for in-home visits. It’s always a good idea to have more than one
person conducting a field study, if only to make sure there’s somebody around to
take pictures, video, and notes while the other person interacts with the participants.
And, it allows you the opportunity to try tag-team interviewing. For in-home studies,
working in pairs is especially important because home visits are much more personal
than office visits. In our experience, participants are more at ease when more than
one person shows up at their door. (It seems more official.) And, for you, it’s simply
safer for two people to enter the home of an unknown person. You’ll find that having a
second researcher along keeps the visit professional and safe, but still allows for some
informality.

• Dress appropriately. You’ll want to blend into the environment in which you are
observing. This will help put the participants at ease, and if you are in a busy or public
environment it will prevent you from standing out and drawing too much attention. In
a corporate office environment, find out what the dress code is and wear something
that complies. In a lab environment, find out if you should wear lab coats or any type of
protective gear. In a home environment, business casual is probably best because you’ll
look professional without being off-putting.
Interviewing participants
In some cases, you’ll be able to just interrupt the user with a question during the course of
the observation. In other situations—due to the nature of the work or in an effort to keep the
flow going—you’ll want to defer your questions and ask them during a break in the action.
(Note that such breaks are a good idea for just this purpose, so you’ll want to prepare the
person you are observing that your presence will cause some disruption.)
Avoid asking “yes/no” questions. Open-ended questions require thorough answers, and help
make the interview more of a conversation, rather than an interrogation.
Following are examples of the things you might ask in these interviews:
• Goals – You’ll already know a good bit about the user’s workplace goals before you
get out in the field. (You got a handle on high-level goals during the “Understanding the
domain” step in “Chapter 2: Planning Your Field Study.”) However, you might want to
talk with users directly about their views of the stated goals. Where appropriate, consider
talking to front-line people and their managers. You’ll hear everything from, “We want
to be number one in sales,” to “We want to answer a customer’s question within thirty
seconds,” and “We want to provide growth for our employees.” All of this information is
important to know. It represents the world the user lives in.
You might also ask about the user’s personal work goals and how their performance
is measured. What motivates them to do their job every day? Is their current position a
stepping-stone to another position they aspire to, and if so, how? The personal goals and
motivation a person brings to a job can give you insight into what tools they need to do
that job well.

• Likes and dislikes – You might want to spend some time getting at what users like
and dislike about their work. You’ll especially want to look for places where user
attitudes conflict with workplace goals. These sources of tension are potentially places
where your later re-engineering efforts could reap benefits. Ask about likes and dislikes
pertaining to the work, but also ask about the likes and dislikes regarding the current
technology in use. Again, at a minimum, it’s an important step in knowing what the user
has to deal with.
• Targeted questions – You will likely have a series of specific questions to get at details
of the work and tasks you are studying. These questions might take the form of “How
do you do X?” or “How often do you need to do Y?” or “Under what circumstances do
you use Z?” The particular problem you are trying to solve will generate these questions,
because in order to solve the problem, you need to fully understand it. These questions
can also be a great segue to observing tasks users perform because you can ask the user
to show you as they answer the questions.
• Problem spots – You might be interested in specific problem areas in using existing
software, such as incidents of lost work or the need to refer to documentation. With
some direction toward specific events (e.g., “Think about a time in the last week that
you had to refer to the online help system.”), you can help users talk accurately about
trouble spots without having to encounter them while you are present.
• Opinions – You may want to ask the users what types of changes, additions, or
deletions they’d like to see to the existing technology or work process. They are doing
this job and using these tools every day, so they probably have some opinions about
what would make their job easier. If you solicit these opinions, do it at the end of your
session so you are sure to complete the interview and observation.
Observing tasks
You’ll want to go beyond the experiential, and more analytically understand user tasks. This
means paying attention and taking notes. Your notes can be fairly free-form, but they should
be detailed. Take detailed notes on:
• Process steps – For each task you observe, make note of the steps in the process. If you
are taking pictures, try taking a picture of each step. You can use the pictures to create
a storyboard for the analysis phase. You’ll obviously want to note the order of the steps,
but also include where you observe errors made, inefficiencies, and constraints. When
you get to the design phase, these will be things you might focus on to improve the
software and ultimately the task flow.

• Verbalized frustrations/problems/thoughts – As the user talks through the task

you are observing, make special note of frustrations expressed, problems described,
and other verbalized thoughts. These quotes from users can be very powerful when you
are reporting your findings (especially when multiple users make the same comments).
More than that, these thoughts are clues into the root of problem areas and perhaps
even into potential solutions.
• Physical movement – How much physical movement is involved in completing tasks

and why? Does the user leave his workstation because he lacks the tools needed there?
If so, perhaps simply putting those tools in his workstation would make task completion
more efficient.
Does the user switch between the keyboard and mouse often? Or, does she use awkward
combination-key shortcuts to features? If so, you’ll want to consider how the new design
can reduce this motor load. But, just note the physical issues now; don’t get sidetracked
by trying to design solutions just yet.
• Use of tools – What tools does the user need to complete the task? You are likely
focusing on a piece of software, but make note of other tools needed—things such as:
other software, notepaper, calculator, reference manuals, etc. In some cases, these tools
can indicate inefficiencies in the software.
For example, part way through preparing a homeowner’s insurance quote a user needed
to choose a value for a classification field. She went to a competitor’s web site to use
a tool to calculate the appropriate value. This was noted as an inefficiency for that
step because she could have completed the task more efficiently if that same tool was
available in the quoting software she was using.
• Communications with other people – How often and under what circumstances
does the user need to confer with other people to complete a task? Perhaps the user
needs to get a manager’s authorization for special cases. How does that communication
take place? Is there a way to streamline that process, maybe with an online
authorization? Or, does the user often ask others how to complete a task? If so, perhaps
an improved conceptual model or a help system could reduce the need to consult
others.
• Papers, forms, or online references – When does the user need to use forms or
reference material to complete a task? Are those materials in paper form or online?
Regardless of the format, if a user must often use reference material, that might signal
problems in the conceptual model or information architecture of the software. Make
note of the specific references being used. If paper forms are used often, perhaps they
could be completed online to streamline the work task.

• Decision points – At what points in the process steps does the user need to make
decisions? What type of information does the user need to make those decisions? How
accessible is the needed information? There might be opportunities to help the user find
that information more efficiently.
• Sticky notes and cheat sheets – Some of the best clues into what is lacking in a
software tool come in the form of sticky notes and cheat sheets. People have these
papers around their work area to help them remember quickly how to do something. If
users need these reminders, then the software is not helping users to navigate efficiently
or to find information quickly.
Possible clue for system design

While we were studying people using an insurance quoting system,
one participant had this note taped to her bookshelf. This seems like
information that could be programmed into the system to help guide the
user through the task completion.
• Handwritten notes – Make note of when and why users write notes on paper while
working a task. This might be a clue that the software design does not efficiently help the
user through a task, especially if the user is losing context as she moves from screen to
screen. Or, it might mean that the software does not perform efficiently.

For example, a call center representative asked the caller for an updated telephone
number. The caller gave her two numbers. She typed the first number into the software,
but wrote the second number on a piece of paper. Because the software did a “database
commit” after the entry of each phone number, it processed too slowly for the user to
enter both numbers at pace with the conversation.
• Redundant data entry – If the user needs to enter the same data more than once
while working a task then the software is not doing its job. Make note of where and
under what circumstances the user is redundantly entering data. This kind of software
problem is “low-hanging fruit” and should be easy to fix.

Observing the environment
As part of your note taking during task observations, you will be taking in environmental
aspects of the task, especially as they immediately affect a task (e.g., the distant location of
a printer affecting the user’s decision about when to print during a process). In addition to
these notes, you’ll want to explicitly focus on the environment, in order to better remember
it, share it with others, and look for factors that affect the user’s work. Here are some things
you might capture:
• Photographs – Take photographs of individual work areas, common areas, and the
outside of the building. You will also want to photograph the participants as they work,
being sure to capture any job aids or posted shortcuts they might be using.
• Statistics on the physical environment – Note the number of people in the

workplace, hours of operation, physical hazards, noise and lighting levels, etc. Does the
user sit near or far from common areas and co-workers? How does that impact the user’s
work?
• Social atmosphere – Record your impressions of things like camaraderie, tension, etc.
What does it feel like to be in this environment? How does the social atmosphere affect
information sharing and knowledge transfer?
Capturing it all
There is a lot to capture when you are observing, and you won’t necessarily know which
details will make a difference to your design. To be safe, record as many details as possible.
Here are some useful techniques:
• Consider a pilot. Conduct a pilot session (or dry run) to see how long you need for the
observations and to work out any kinks in your approach. This extra step will allow you
to better arrange your visits and properly set expectations at the user’s site. You’ll also
find out whether you are asking the right questions.
The best part of a pilot session is that you can use the data gathered, even if you tweak
the study plan. It is not like a usability test where you need to have each participant do
exactly the same tasks with exactly the same software, which negates data from a dry
run if any changes are made. Here, if you add questions, you just need to contact the
pilot user and get the answers to those questions.

• Work with a team member. You might be thinking, “How do I capture all of these
notes and still experience the user’s world?” It’s difficult, but there are ways to mitigate
the conflict. A nice option is to work with a team member when doing observations,
taking turns recording and just watching.
• Videotape or audio tape. Another approach is to videotape or audio tape the

observations, and to rely on going back to the tapes to fill in the gaps or revisit issues.
This is a viable approach, but it’s not always practical, especially if you do a large
number of observations. However, video is a great way to share the experience of the
user’s work with others on your team who don’t get to observe. They can watch the
unedited tapes at their convenience.

Video clips are a powerful way of documenting your work for others, especially if you
want to highlight an issue experienced by multiple users. Show several people in a row
making a similar comment to really drive that point home.
You might be concerned that people won’t act naturally on tape. Once you get into
the rhythm of the session, your user is likely to forget that you are recording. Do you
have to transcribe the results? In most cases you don’t because you had the firsthand
experience. If you decide to videotape people, ask users for their permission, and have
them sign a written release form if you intend to use the video in a highlight tape or
other production.
• Take photographs. Showing pictures is a great way to share your experience of

the environment with people on your team who do not go on the visits. Pictures also
help you remember each site. Consider taking photos of things like what’s posted on
cubicle walls and printing screenshots of the user’s current software so you can create
a system map of their online world. Take pictures of the steps in a task so that you
can create a storyboard of the task. You might want pictures of awards, recognition,
and success measures for insight into the culture of the business. If you choose not to
videotape, consider taking pictures and audio taping. You can create some powerful
documentation with still pictures and sound.

What if recording equipment is not allowed at the site?
You might be studying a process and users at a site that will not allow you
to videotape, audio tape, or take pictures because the work is sensitive and
there are strict security measures in place. That doesn’t mean you won’t get
valuable data. It means you’ll need to take really good notes! Maybe you’ll
want to take another team member who can focus on the environment
while you focus on the work.
Sometimes the objections to pictures and video are less about security
and more about personality. Some people are simply uncomfortable with
pictures and video. If this is the case, you might want to take your recording
equipment with you and ask permission again when you get to the site.
If you are still denied, take pictures of the outside of the building (public
space) so that you have at least those images to distinguish the visit.
• Take notes and sketch. The most practical approach is to do the best you can with
note taking and sketches during the actual observation, but rely on some quiet time after
each observation to record some of your still-fresh observations from memory. While
observing tasks you might want to time-stamp the beginning and end of the tasks for
rough task-completion time. However, be aware that your presence affects the elapsed
time of the task; especially, if the user is explaining to you what she is doing as she
works.
Because we live in a high-tech world, you might think it will be easier to take notes if you
use a laptop or notebook computer. It will actually make it harder for you to establish
rapport with the user because the screen creates a barrier between you and the user.
Users cannot see what you are typing which can cause them to feel evaluated and they
might be less forthcoming. Also, if you are in an environment where you need to be on
your feet and follow the user, it will be impossible to take notes on a computer.
• Collect forms and other workplace artifacts. You’ll want to collect samples
of the forms and documents that users use to complete the tasks that you observe. If
possible, try to get “used” artifacts—that is, copies of forms that have things written
in, and reference documents that contain the user’s notes. Cheat sheets and “how to”
notes are also valuable artifacts to collect. Such written-in information and annotations
provide you with context of use and with potential problems. If the artifacts contain real
customer data, make a copy, thoroughly cross out the data, and make another copy
to take with you. This will allow you to respect the confidentiality of your user’s client
while giving you insight into the type of information needed for the task.

• Observe tasks that span a long time. Sometimes a task can take several days to
complete (e.g., processing a mortgage), making observation of the task difficult. In these
cases, consider role-playing so you can skip the gaps in the process. Or, observe each
step in the task for different cases. If there are handoffs in the process, you might need to
visit with multiple users to see all the steps.
Another very useful technique for collecting longitudinal data is to leave participants
with a hand-held tape recorder for recording their activities over time. You can attach
a list of prompts or questions to the recorder so you’re getting consistent information.
You’ll want to have these tapes transcribed. It will be easier and faster to review and
analyze the recorded data if you have it in written form.
Filling in the gaps
If you are watching actual work—and especially if the user you are observing is working
with a customer—things will go by too quickly, and you will have gaps in your notes and
understanding. For example, you might have some confusion about whether a step is
optional or what information the user was actually looking at. Here are some techniques for
filling in the gaps:
• Role play. If it isn’t possible to observe the tasks you’re interested in, you might ask
users to role play. For example, if the user normally works with a customer, you (or
another member of your team) can play the role of that customer. This approach can let
you step through a task of interest at will, instead of relying on the task to come up in the
course of real work. This approach also works to verify a task you have observed. You
and the user can re-enact the task.
• Use aided recall. This approach is similar to a think-aloud protocol, except it requires
that you videotape the user doing work and then have her watch herself on video,
commenting on her thought processes and answering your questions.
• Recall “critical incidents.” With this technique, you ask users to recall situations in
which things didn’t work the way they should. Ask them to show you what happened.
You might also want to ask users to recall situations where everything worked perfectly.

Write Site Reports

Site reports are a great tool for incrementally sharing the data you gathered on the visit.
Stakeholders and others on your team can get anxious to see some results, especially if you
do a study with many participants that spans several weeks. By delivering site reports shortly
after each visit, you can keep everyone up to date with your progress and your findings.
More importantly, site reports get the visit data ready for the analysis step after all the visits
are complete.
Preparing for analysis
When you come back from a single site visit, you’ll have lots of notes, completed surveys,
and photographs. Multiply that by the number of visits in your study and the task of going
through that data can be overwhelming! Writing site reports forces you to verify your notes
and summarize what you learned on that visit. When you get to the analysis phase, your
notes will already be in a format that is easy to work with. Here are some things to keep in
mind while writing your site reports:
• Start right away. Begin working on your site report as soon as possible after the visit
ends, while the experience is still fresh in your mind. You should not wait until all your
visits are complete before starting the report on your first visit. After a series of visits, it is
difficult to distinguish one visit from the next if you haven’t spent some time reviewing
and summarizing your notes. The experiences will tend to run together in your mind. If
you spend one day doing two or three visits, spend the next day or two writing the site
reports for those visits.
If you see multiple users at one site, you might write one report covering all the users.
But, if you have lots of data, or if different researchers visited each user, you might write
one report per user.
• Get notes from observers. If other observers went on the visit, be sure to get their
notes. Their notes help you verify your own notes, or they might have seen something
that you missed. And, if someone on your team was assigned a special data-gathering
task (like taking all the photographs) you’ll obviously need to get their materials as input
to your report.
• Summarize interview responses. You should document all of the users’ responses
to your interview questions in the report. The report will be more interesting to read,
and your readers will develop an image of the user if you summarize those responses
in prose format, as opposed to listing the questions with the corresponding responses.
It works well to follow the same format or order of questions from your script when
summarizing the responses. Each section of your script becomes a section in the report.

• Describe observed tasks. For each task that you observed the user perform, list out
the steps. Indicate what the user’s goals were, where problems were encountered, when
other tools were used, and why other people were consulted during the task.
• Include survey data. For each survey the user completed, include the user’s
responses. You might have one page for each type of survey at the end of the report.
Tip:
For the analysis phase you’ll need a spreadsheet (or other mechanism) to
summarize the survey responses from all users. After you document the
responses from a survey in the site report, enter the responses right away
in your analysis spreadsheet. You’ll only have to deal with the survey data
once, and you’ll be getting a jump on the analysis!
• Review with observers. If other people went on the visit with you, and especially if
they provided you notes, ask them to review the report. Make sure that they agree with
your summary of the experience.
Sharing the visit data
Your site reports serve another important purpose: keeping interested parties in the loop.
While you are busy visiting users and gathering data, the project stakeholders and other team
members might wonder about the progress. If they are not going on the visits, then they are
not seeing the results of your work. There can be significant elapsed time between the first
site visit and the analysis phase documentation, leaving others to wonder whether the study
is useful. By delivering site reports, you can share your data and assure others that valuable
project work is being completed.


Figure 11. Incremental site report: Sharing the visit data

(Sample on page 92)
While the data itself will be interesting, here are some ways to make your site reports even
more compelling and useful:
• Tell a story — Your report will be much more engaging if you tell a story about the
visit, rather than just listing interview responses and task-observation notes. Telling a
story also helps people develop an image of the user. When designers and developers
imagine real people—instead of abstract user types—they have more empathy for the
users and are better prepared to create more usable products for those users.
• Illustrate with photographs — Pictures grab people’s attention and make the report
more interesting to read. Pictures also help tell the story. Include pictures of the user so
that your readers can attach a face to this data. Include pictures of the user’s workstation
and common areas so that your readers develop a sense for what it is like to work in that
environment. Include pictures of interesting artifacts so that your readers understand
what other tools and materials support the work. You might even scan actual artifacts
and put those images in your report.

• Determine distribution method — In most cases, you’ll probably deliver your report
in PDF format or in paper format. Depending upon the size of your audience, and your
corporate culture, you might want to post the reports on a central LAN space, your
intranet, or a special project web site. If you’ve done recordings, you might also include
interesting sound bites and video clips.
• Deliver shortly after the visit — Most importantly, deliver your site reports as soon
after the visits as possible. Your audience will be most anxious for your reports after the
first visit or two of a new study. They will appreciate the timely updates as your study
progresses.

chapter four:
analyzing the data
A Common Sense Approach for Discovering User Needs Analyzing the Data
The Analysis Process

Now you’re back in the office, exhilarated and exhausted from your field research. You and
your team members have lots of notes, videotapes, and heads full of experience. Now is the
time to get all of that data in a useful form. You’ll be making sense of the things you gathered
and experienced, aiming for an accurate record of “what is,” and brainstorming about “what
could be.”
Analysis activities
The analysis phase will be easier to approach and manage if you break down the work into
these major activities:
1. Organize your data. With experience, you’ll determine the method that works best
for you. One way to start organizing your data is to collect all quantifiable data and
group it by type. For example, gather all the demographic surveys and task surveys
so you can summarize the data for each group. You will also want to go through your
interview and observation notes to make sure you can decipher them. If you took
handwritten notes, you may want to rewrite them or clarify certain portions.
2. Illustrate the current state. For each visit you went on, document how the users
perform their work (or play.) Describe the people involved and the environment they
are in—anything you learned during your visit. After you’ve done this for all visits,
try to summarize or generalize the process, people, and environment by highlighting
commonalities and trends. Also, point out key variations found on each visit because
the variations might affect the designs or changes you contemplate. Before moving on to
the next step, find ways to validate your view of the current state. For example, consider
a focus group with typical users.
You can share your documentation from this step with others who have a stake in this
project. It will show them the progress you are making and keep them up to date with
what you are learning.

3. Identify opportunities for improvement. Once you have a clear view of the current
state you are studying, you can look for areas where the process, the product, or the
technology might be improved to help the users achieve their goals and complete
their tasks more efficiently. Look for bottlenecks, inefficiencies, handoffs that slow
the process, common mistakes, opportunities for error, workarounds created by the
users, and statements of frustration by the people you visited. Ask yourself and your
colleagues, “In all that we’ve observed and experienced on our visits, what are the most
important problem areas and greatest opportunities for improvement?”
4. Prioritize problems and opportunities. Prioritize the problems and opportunities

that you identified. (Consider having end users and key stakeholders participate in
the prioritization by holding working sessions where participants establish criteria
for prioritizing, then group and vote on the problem statements.) At this point, you
are developing user experience requirements to feed into the design phase. These
requirements support the users’ goals. They will merge with business and technical
requirements to create user interface requirements for the design.
5. Make recommendations. Brainstorm possible solutions for the high priority problems
and opportunities. (Again, consider opening the brainstorming activity to a larger
group. This will ensure that you generate a broad range of ideas.) You’ll take these ideas
forward into the design phase to determine which are most feasible given project and
technology constraints.
6. Illustrate improvements. You’ll want to communicate your recommendations and

your vision of “what could be.” This is the first step in the design process, so it is very
important to document and share your ideas. Show how your recommendations will
benefit the users and improve the process or product. Then, find ways to validate your
ideas. Consider taking storyboards, concept sketches, or initial rough prototypes to end
users to get their first impressions.
You can use various tools to accomplish this work. Some of the tools can be reused for
more than one of the steps. We will talk more about specific tools later. First, let’s talk
about how you might approach analysis differently for large and small projects.

A process for large projects
A large project is one in which you make many site visits, or where there are many team
members going on the visits. Such projects require a bit more coordination than smaller
projects. Here are some pointers to help manage larger projects.
Organize and illustrate between visits

Don’t wait until the end of the last visit to look over your data from the first visit—especially
your handwritten notes. You will forget much of what you heard and saw, and you might not
even understand your own notes. Instead, take time between visits to review your notes and
to document what you learned on the most recent visit. This will keep the data fresh in your
mind. It will also help you see trends and issues as you complete the visits. In essence, you’ll
begin the analysis process while completing the data gathering.
Keep others informed between visits

When you work on a large project, there will likely be many people interested in your
progress and your findings. Other designers, engineers, various levels of management, and
possibly even other product teams will want to know what you are learning. If you take
the time to organize and document your data between visits, you can show your progress,
share preliminary findings, and bring the users and their environment to life for everyone.
People who are not directly involved in your study are likely to accept and believe your final
analysis if they see the data as you gather it. Keep all the interested people “in the loop.”
Reconvene team after last visit

The advantage of discussing the data as a team is that every person—especially people from
different disciplines—can have a different view of the data. The team can do a far better job
of analyzing data and avoiding a biased analysis than any one person can.
Of course, it often makes sense for an individual to consolidate some of the data before the
team discusses it. This is especially true if one person on the team dominated an activity,
such as collecting the observations of the physical environment.
In preparation for your analysis activity, consider the following:
• Clear your calendar for two or three days. You’ll want big blocks of time to
discuss the data.

• Reserve a room. Find a conference room, preferably one with comfortable seating
and several whiteboards, and reserve it for the number of days you plan to be analyzing.
(If you can get the room for longer, do so. Ideally, you’ll want to post the results of your
work on the room walls where members of the team and others can reflect on it.)
• Organize and discuss the data. This is where you’ll come to consensus on the
current state of the process you observed. You’ll dig into the data and get your hands
dirty, using tools to make sense of the data. Once your team is clear about the current
state, look for improvement opportunities and make recommendations.
• Divide the work. Capitalize on the resources available. Divide the work of
documenting and illustrating your findings and recommendations. This will help you
produce deliverables more quickly so you can share your work with other interested
parties and keep the larger development effort moving.
A process for small projects
A small project is one in which you make just a few site visits, or where the research team
has only one or two people. With a smaller amount of data and fewer people analyzing it,
you can do the work in a less structured manner than on a large project.
• Organize and illustrate each visit. This is still an important step for each individual
working on the study. It helps you make sense of your notes and gives you an organized
document from which to do the detailed analysis. It will also help you see trends and
issues as you complete the visits, and it helps you communicate your progress to other
interested parties.
• Work individually, then meet to collaborate. Spend time with your data looking
for trends, issues, and opportunities for improvements. Think about recommendations
you would make based on your findings. Then, meet with your other team member(s)—
who should have done the same with their own data—and compare notes. Discuss your
collective findings and recommendations, and then come to consensus. Of course, if
you are working alone on a study you won’t have a collaboration step.
• Document findings and recommendations. Always document your findings and

recommendations to share with other interested parties, or at least as an archive of your
work. Divide up the work with your other team member(s), if necessary.
Now, let’s talk about some tools you might use to analyze your data and to document your
findings.

Organize Data and Illustrate Findings

If you’ve taken care to extract as much information from your participants as possible, you’ll
have mounds of data to sift through. Here are some ideas for organizing your data and
pulling out the key findings.
Communicating the big picture
You can use various tools to help you organize your data and to illustrate what you learned
on your visits. You can often use these same tools later to present your ideas for “what could
be.”
Start with the “big picture” by gathering the team’s impressions of what the user’s
world is like and capturing the major flow of the work. Some useful tools for eliciting
and documenting the big picture are “day in the life” scenarios, illustrated stories, and
storyboards. You need not use all of these tools every time, but you should try each
technique at some point.
• Illustrated stories – Writing a story about a field visit is a good way to “get it all out”
when you return to the office. This quick “brain dump” method might end up being
one of your most valuable deliverables from the process. If you can tell an interesting
story about the people you visit, you can remember what they did, how they felt, what
they liked and disliked. If you add photographs to the stories, you will have compelling
documents that people will want to read.
After each site visit, consider writing an illustrated story and distributing it via e-mail.
This will give everyone who is interested in the progress of the study a chance to see
how things are going. It will also give people a preview of the kind of information you
are collecting. Of course, this incremental reporting is also a good way for you to make
sure you deal with the data while it is still fresh in your mind.

• “Day in the life” scenarios – We mentioned

“day in the life” descriptions earlier, back in the
“Identifying the work” stage of field study planning.
Such a description captures your impressions
of the user’s world in a narrative form, covering
everything from roles and responsibilities, to
attitudes, problems, use of technology, and the
physical environment. You could have each team
member produce a “day in the life” description
and share them as a way to introduce the team’s
impressions from the site visits.
Profiles and personas – After you’ve completed

all your visits and you have started to analyze Figure 12. A “Day in the life” scenario.
(Sample on page 98)
your data, you can illustrate the typical people
doing the work you observed. By summarizing your demographic data, you can create
a composite profile of the people you visited, calling out the commonalties in the
demographics.
When you combine usage data with the demographic data, you can create
representative personas. You might find that subsets of your participants approach the
work (or play) in a common fashion. They might have common goals, or step through
the workflow in a similar way. Represent this group of users with a persona. Describe
this representative person’s goals, usage patterns, demographics, environment, and any
other interesting information to help paint a picture. Make use of the actual data you
collected from real users to create this composite persona.
Figure 13. User profile of Dorothy.

Field Research Informs Role-based Design

For an insurance servicing application, one of the business requirements
set at the beginning of the project was to allow the user to have multiple
customer records open at one time. The team was sure this feature would
solve a lot of problems that the users had with the current version of the
application. However, our field research showed that only one out of four
different user roles needed—or even wanted—multiple customer records
open. For the one user type, the research confirmed that having multiple
customer records open would be a big improvement. But for the other
three types of users, having more than one customer record open would
actually make their work more difficult (and, in turn, make the application
more difficult to use). The resulting design for the application provided
two different configurations. The application presented each user with
the appropriate configuration based on their login information, which
coincides with the user type.
• Storyboards – Storyboards are your first step into the realm of the visual. They are
essentially cartoon strips of the user’s world that capture the user’s actions, decisions,
and environment.
Your first storyboards will depict larger processes. That is, you want to look at
“processing a mortgage,” as opposed to “running a credit check.” Later you will create
storyboards in which each “cell” documents a particular step of a task. Here, each
cell might represent an entire task. You are looking to represent the range of tasks and
connections between tasks in a visual way.

Don’t underestimate the visual aspect of this approach! Even if your cartoons include
the crudest representation, the visual presence of people gives the workflow life: It starts
to create a story, which is much more effective in evoking what you saw than a flow
chart of text.
Figure 14. Storyboard of the scenario

(Sample on page 100)

Figure 15. Photo storyboard

Working with the data
After you’ve documented what you’ve learned about the process you’ve researched, it’s
time to dig into the data and look for ways to improve the product or process. You need to
analyze the data by drilling into the details. You’ll look for ways to slice the data to make
sense of it.
Spreadsheets and tick sheets

To find trends and patterns in the workflow, problems encountered, successes experienced,
or product usage, try automated spreadsheets like Microsoft Excel™, or even simple tick
sheets on scratch paper. Using your notes or illustrated stories, identify key workflow steps,
issues, behaviors, etc., and keep a tally of how many of your study participants experienced
each. Soon you will see useful trends and patterns emerge that will help you brainstorm
design solutions.
If you have quantifiable data like task rankings or demographic data, automated
spreadsheets help you organize the data, summarize the data, and present the data all at the
same time.
Affinity diagrams
Creating an affinity diagram is a group activity in which members of the team generate sticky
notes containing discrete observations and group-like notes—ones that share an “affinity”—
on a whiteboard or wall.
The goal is to collect many individual observations and then to give order to them. An
example note might be, “Jane often chooses not to refresh the data on her screen because
she doesn’t like to wait.” That note might find its way into a category called “Performance
Problems.”

One way to speed this process is to anticipate the categories that interest you and your
team. For example, you might know that you are interested in “Reasons for Accessing the
Documentation.” You could put that category on the board, before you start the session.
Lists of trends and issues

From your spreadsheets, tick sheets, and affinity diagrams, you should see trends develop.
You might also uncover issues that weren’t obvious to you before. Or, you might simply
identify something you want to track. Summarizing these trends and issues in lists gives you
results to share, as well as things to pay attention to when you brainstorm solutions.
Sometimes, field research will uncover issues outside the scope of your project. For example,
you might realize that the product you are developing will have previously unforeseen
consequences on the work environment, the personnel, or the technology. Although
you might not be able to address such issues yourself, keep a list and the supporting
documentation that you can forward to the appropriate department or team
Process flows
Consolidate the workflow and process step-notes from your incremental reports to create
process-flow diagrams of key tasks. Annotate these flow diagrams with opportunities for
improvement, notes on bottlenecks or key pain points, etc. (Flow-charting tools like Visio™
or OmniGraffle™ are helpful to create these flow diagrams.)
Showing the details of individual tasks
Once you’ve captured the big picture, you’ll want to drill down on your understanding of
individual tasks. To do this, you’ll want to produce more detailed deliverables.
Task scenarios
Describe in detail how a particular task is completed. For each step in the task flow, describe
the user’s goal, the actions taken, the tools used, other people that are involved, and the
results. Point out where there are decision points, but describe the typical, or most probable,
set of steps for the task. (You can make notations highlighting problem areas to pay attention
to when you brainstorm solutions.)
Detailed storyboards
To illustrate your task scenarios, you’ll create storyboard cells for each step in a task, and
add annotations for artifacts used (such as paper forms), time elapsed, etc.

Here are some things to remember when creating detailed storyboards:
• Provide a story, not an abstraction. It’s very important to note that these
storyboards tell the story of a concrete, individual event. That is, your storyboard will
involve characters who have names (like “Julian,” not “Accountant A”), and those
characters make decisions. (However, it’s best to change the names of the actual users
to protect their identities.) As such, your storyboard doesn’t present alternative-choice
branches like a flowchart (although it will document decision points). When you tell a
story, it has to be concrete, even if it is a fictional conglomeration of several observations
of the same task.
• Go for the 80% case. As a team, you will have to make choices about the story you
will tell to represent the task. (You need not worry about losing data when you make
those choices because you will be capturing all of the possibilities in a corresponding
flow chart.) When you make those choices, try to make the storyboard realistic and try
to capture the “80% case.” That is, represent what’s common. So, if a step in a task is
optional, and it’s the exception to take it, don’t take that step in the storyboard. There
are exceptions to this rule, but for the most part, you want to be creating stories that are
representative of the user’s world.
• Avoid screen details. If the task you are representing involves multiple people or
movement around an office, or even movement at a desk, the cells of your storyboard
should capture those people and those spaces. Some cells will necessarily focus on a
screen, but you should avoid too much screen detail since it will cloud the essence of
the step.
Flow charts
To capture the details of task flows, you’ll probably need to create some flow charts. Flow
charts explicitly document the possible branching in the task flow (unlike storyboards,
which focus on a single path through the task).
Another difference between storyboards and flow charts is that flow charts are more logical
than visual. You’ll find that some people will have an easier time creating and understanding
the symbols of a flow chart, while others will favor the story line and people-pictures of a
storyboard. You’ll want to work with what is comfortable, but try both techniques because
the different views they provide are valuable.

Analyzing task rankings
If you’ve collected task rankings from participants during the data gathering phase, you’ll
want a logical way to analyze your data.
Create a “top ten” list

When you’ve completed the study and have all your
rankings—importance and frequency, you’ll want to look
at those results and prioritize the set that you will focus
on when you begin to design. Prioritizing can be difficult,
depending on how the rankings diverge and how they
fit into the categories. Base your approach on heuristics
more than formulas. For example, you might decide to
concentrate only on the tasks that received high ratings
in both frequency and importance, but make exceptions
for some low-frequency tasks if they were in the top-five
according to importance. Don’t be afraid to take several
cuts at the list, using different criteria. There is no magic
Figure 16. A “top ten” list: prioritizing the tasks.
formula or even a set number of tasks that you have to (Sample on page 105)
end up with. If in doubt, aim for creating a unified top ten
list that you feel good about.
If you do get rankings on more than one aspect or from more than one type of respondent,
you might want to reflect that split when you “roll up” the data. While you will rarely be
doing quantitative work that is rigorous enough to identify statistical significance, you might
spot some important trends in the data.
Sum of inverses
We often use the “sum of inverses” method to analyze our task rankings. Here’s how we do
it: First, collect task ranking survey responses from the study participants. Then, using the
Sum of Inverses spreadsheet :
1. Enter all “frequency” responses on one sheet; one respondent per column.
2. Enter all “importance” responses on one sheet; one respondent per column.
3. Sort each sheet by the “sum of inverses” column in descending order.
4. Enumerate the sorted tasks from 1–10, starting at the
top (on each sheet).
5. To combine importance and frequency:
a. Create a new sheet with the top ten importance tasks and the top ten frequency
tasks.
b. Eliminate duplicate tasks.
c. Enter the summarized importance rankings in one column (the 1–10 enumerated
values from step 4).

d. Enter the summarized frequency rankings in another column (the 1–10 enumerated

values from step 4).
e. (Optional) Enter the weighting factor in a third column.
f. Sort the “sum of inverses” column in descending order.
g. Enumerate the sorted tasks from 1–10, starting at the top.

Note on weighting: Weighting varies by study, and might
not even be used at all. You may want to give more weight
to “importance” or more to “frequency.” We typically give
weight to tasks that rank in both the top ten frequency and
the top ten importance. We put a value of 1 in the weight
column for those tasks.
Figure 17. Sum of Inverses

Selecting visual techniques
The methods you select for visualizing data will affect the way people receive
the data:
• Formal notations – Some approaches to workflow analysis advocate creating formal

diagrams using a standard notation. For example, you might use a particular symbol to
represent two-way collaboration between users, or another symbol to mark a problem
spot in a flow. In general, trust yourself and the team process to develop the materials
you need. However, you might consider a more standard notation if you have many
people developing materials or you have a large amount of material. (In these cases, the
consistency will help.)
• Drawing – People on your team might be resistant to drawing storyboards because

they believe they “can’t draw a thing.” Try! You don’t need to be an artist to produce
useful storyboards. To get started, consider using simple shapes. Don’t get hung up on
details (unless the detail is relevant to the task), and take a fun and relaxed approach to
showing your work to others.
• Photographs – As an alternative to drawing, consider constructing your storyboards

from pictures or video stills. This approach can be more time-consuming. Or, you might
not have the right shot. If possible, consider staging photographs, but be careful to
accurately recreate what you saw.

Validating “what is”
The purpose of a field visit is to accurately characterize the users’ current situation, or “what
is.” When you understand “what is,” you will be ready to define “what could be.”
• Ask users to validate your findings. You may have done some validation of your
workflow descriptions during the observation stage by having users review portions of
your notes immediately after the observation—especially if you were unsure about the
accuracy of what you recorded.
• Later, have users walk through your results. The analysis phase will always
introduce some new assumptions that you need to check. So, once you’ve got your
storyboards and flow charts for the tasks that you’ve targeted (your “top ten”), you might
want users to comment on your interpretation of the processes and your assumptions
about the 80% cases.
• Consider an interactive focus group. An interactive focus group can work well for
this validation because you can use it to prioritize your findings from the observations
and interviews, as well as to evaluate early design recommendations and concepts. We
stress interaction, because it’s important that you ask the participants to do some work
for you. You should ask them to do some specific exercises during the focus group so
you get quantitative data as well as qualitative. If you can’t get back to the actual users,
seek out domain experts at your workplace.

Identify Opportunities
and Make Recommendations
The most important part of the entire field studies process is determining what the results
mean and how they can result in improvements or new concepts. Here are some pointers for
identifying the opportunities and making design recommendations.

Identifying improvement opportunities
Up to this point, your analysis activity has been aimed at understanding and documenting
the “what is”—the user’s current world. That’s been the correct focus because your primary
goal in field research is to understand the user’s work, not necessarily to change it. Still, this
early stage of the user-centered design process is a perfect time to improve how people do
their work. This is where you need to put your “thinking cap” on, and where you get to be
creative.
Trends and patterns

It’s very likely that you’ve already had thoughts on improving the users’ work. Validate your
thoughts by looking for trends and patterns in the data. Look for these commonalities across
your participants:
• Inefficiencies – Do the users have the tools they need? Are those tools easily
accessible? Can the users step through the work process in a logical and efficient
manner?
• Bottlenecks – Do the users need to hand off the work at a certain point? If so, why can’t
they complete it themselves? Do they suspend their own work while waiting for other
processes to complete or information from someone else?
• Extra steps – Are there redundant or unnecessary steps in the process? Are there steps
that could be combined?
• Unmet needs – Are there user needs that aren’t being met by the current products,
processes, or systems? How might you meet those unmet needs?
• Opportunities – What ideas come to mind for making the work process more efficient,
removing the bottlenecks, and serving the users’ unmet needs?

Unexpected product ideas

When you are out in the field doing your research, you should “expect the unexpected.”
While doing in-home research on television internet access, we learned that people often
use the product at night in the dark or dimly lit rooms. While the focus of the study was
on the software portion of the product, we recommended that the provider consider making
a keyboard with illuminated keys that would be easy to see in low-light situations.
Illustrating improvement ideas
Your ideas for improvement could be at various levels of detail, and you should capture all
of these ideas, using whatever techniques seem appropriate. You can use many of the same
tools here as you did earlier for illustrating the current state.
• Scenarios – Write scenarios describing future user experiences. These could be either
“day in the life” scenarios, or individual task scenarios.
• Storyboards – Illustrate your new scenarios with storyboards. Show future task flows,
step-by-step, that eliminate inefficiencies and problems that exist today. Capture the
user’s actions, decisions, and environment.
A note about storyboarding the future – The storyboard is one of

your most powerful tools because it can tell the story of what could be.
Remember that the power of the storyboard is to let the reader see the user
experience of your new vision. And, if you’ve done some re-engineering to
reduce the number of steps in a process, before-and-after storyboards can
give powerful testimony to the possibility of improvement. When producing
these storyboards, keep the following in mind:
• Use your judgment as to whether your thoughts on “what could be”

are best applied to your high-level storyboards or your task-level
storyboards.
• Continue to stay out of screen-level detail. You are still working on

understanding and improving the process.
• Affinity diagrams – Reorganize affinity diagrams that you prepared while

understanding the current state. Create groupings that illustrate improvements. This can
be done as a group activity, and is most useful when you are looking for opportunities
for improvement or recommendations to solve problems.

• Flow charts – Rework flow charts that you prepared while illustrating the current state.
Change, add, and/or eliminate steps to show improvements. You can also use this tool
when you are looking for opportunities for improvement.
• User interface sketches – If you’ve worked on conceptual (or detailed) designs for
the new user interface, prepare simple sketches to illustrate your ideas. Keep them
rough at this point, so that others don’t get distracted with the details. Do line drawings
by hand or with a simple drawing tool.
• Timelines – Timelines are excellent tools for showing “before” and “after” pictures
of a process. If you produce a storyboard showing the current process, detailing all
the necessary steps, you can then produce a second storyboard showing the new,
streamlined process. If you place the second storyboard under the first, you will have a
compelling visual argument for the streamlined process.
Figure 17. Timelines

Documenting recommendations
In practice, this step of analysis overlaps quite a bit with “Identifying improvement
opportunities.” Often, your solution ideas will be a direct response to identifying
an inefficiency or problem area in a process. But, spend some time brainstorming
multiple solutions for each. The important part of this analysis step is to document your
recommendations in a way that is useful for the design team, and in a way that can be rolled
into the larger project specifications documentation.
User requirements
Other people on the project team have likely worked on business requirements, product
requirements, and technical requirements. This is your opportunity to give the user a voice
by creating user requirements. These can take the form of performance benchmarks, or
specifications.

• System performance – After you’ve developed an understanding of the user’s

environment and their overall job responsibilities, you can make some educated
recommendations for how the system, or product, must perform to help people
efficiently complete their work. Express the performance requirements in terms such
as “query results must be returned in five seconds or less, so that the user can provide a
quick answer to the caller,” or “the data on the screen must automatically refresh every
sixty seconds so that the user doesn’t miss any new alarm conditions.”
• Task completion – You might not always be able to make system performance
requirements. Instead, represent the user requirements as the number of steps in a task,
or the number of screens to access a particular feature. For example, you might say “the
user must be able to access feature X directly from the main screen because this task is
performed at least once every hour.” Or, “task Y must be performed in three steps or less
so that the user can provide a quick answer to the caller.”
User interface requirements

Depending on how big your overall project is, or how aggressive the project schedule is, you
might begin design activities during research analysis. Here you will specify user interface
requirements, or specifications, for the screens.
• Conceptual – A natural extension of research analysis is to begin conceptual design

of the product interface. Through your research, you’ve uncovered the “mental model”
that the users bring to this work (how users think about the work.) You can sketch
out conceptually how the screens should work. You will be structuring, or organizing,
features and information needed in the user interface. Your conceptual design should
support the way users think, as well as efficient completion of their tasks.
•
Detailed – It’s tempting to jump right to the details of what the screens will look like,
but try to avoid doing this before you’ve worked on (and validated) the conceptual
design. If you have ideas for detailed screens, definitely capture them so you don’t lose
them. You’ll want to remember those ideas when you move into the design phase of the
project where you’ll develop detailed user interface requirements.
Supporting considerations
If you’ve discovered issues during your research which are out of scope relative to your
portion of the project, document the issues so they can be passed along to the appropriate
people to deal with them.
• Hardware – Will new or additional hardware be needed if this product is developed?

Is there any hardware that will become obsolete?

• Supplemental software – Will other software be needed if this product is rolled out?
For example, in a corporate environment that controls software distribution to workers,
special installation software may be needed on the users’ machines.
• Training – Will training for your product be needed? If training exists today, how will
that training program change?
• Personnel – Will any job positions be added, eliminated, or changed?
Validating “what could be”
As with your “what is” material, you will want to validate your “what could be” material.
You can test very rough sketches with users in a paper prototype review. Be sure to get user
feedback on your concepts as early and as often as possible.
If you’ve done a good job of conceptualizing your improvement ideas, you should find that
there will be fewer steps, the work will take less time, and/or there will be fewer handoffs.
Finally, be sure to think about the implications of the changes: Will there be an impact on
training or hiring? Are there new hardware or network needs? Capture these thoughts and
discuss them as a team, looking for show-stopping issues.

Communicate Results
You’ve experienced the users and their environment, you have artifacts capturing
quantitative and experiential data, and you have validated ideas for improving the workflow.
Now you need to consolidate, promote, and prepare for design.

Consolidating your materials
In the analysis phase, you’ll produce quite a few materials. These materials are useful, either
being essential to forming your understanding of the user’s work or for later use during
actual design. However, you will want to consolidate these materials so they are more
accessible. A good approach is to produce a number of one-page deliverables. For example,
you might produce:
• A collage of photographs depicting the workplaces you visited

• User profiles of your participants
• A summary of user goals
• The list of top ten tasks
• A prioritized list of problems discovered
• A summary of user demographics, highlighting any telling results
• A big-picture storyboard depicting the relationships between tasks
• A “what is” flowchart with a corresponding “what could be” flowchart
• A list of unmet needs
• Personas—composite characters created by grouping the user profiles around key
characteristics.
Create these one-pagers, enlarge them, and post them on a wall where the design team can
see them. The team will use the specifics of the data as they design, and just the presence of
the lists, photographs, profiles, and storyboards will keep the experience fresh.
There is a lot of value in reminding the team of users and tasks as they design. And, you will
find that team members will refer to the data as a resource as they design.

Promoting your work
You’ll also want to use your one-pagers to promote the work you have done. In
environments where field research and user-centered design are new, skeptics and
supporters can benefit from a tangible reminder of what the process yields. For best results,
post the work on a wall and take people for a tour of the materials, supplementing the
one-pagers with anecdotes from the field. In this way, you will pass along the experience to
others.
• Should you produce a report? Your corporate culture might require producing a
report at the conclusion of the field research phase. If so, you have lots of material to
work with. However, don’t automatically assume you need a report to move ahead. The
deliverables you produced—storyboards, flow charts, etc.—are often enough for moving
to the design phase.
• Create deliverables that can be used in many ways. When you create the
deliverables that you will present to people outside your research team, try to keep them
short and interesting. For example, you could create a series of one-page posters that
you can place around a conference room for giving a presentation. The more detailed
analysis could be in the form of reports, but make sure that the posters and stories
contain enough information to give people a good overview. And, of course, use lots of
pictures.
Here’s a set of deliverables from a home study:
For presentations: For further readings:

• Summary poster • Report of findings and recommendations
• Overview posters • Process report
• Illustrated stories • Transcribed log data
• Post-log summaries

Conducting additional research
When you’ve completed your field research, you are ready to move to design. Keep in mind,
though, that the user-centered design process is iterative, meaning you might revisit the
research stage:
• You might conduct fine-tuning research because you missed something or because
you didn’t anticipate everything you need to know. For example, during the analysis
phase, you might find yourself asking, “What criteria does the representative use
to decide between scanning a history of transactions and searching for a specific
transaction?” If you don’t know, you’ll want to find out.
• You might need supplemental research because there is work you purposely did
not study the first time out, and you might find that the tasks you chose were not as
representative as you expected.
Iteration is good. It doesn’t represent “bad” work; rather it is a natural part of the process
and an absolute necessity to ensure that you are working with a true and complete
understanding of the users’ work.
A final word
Storyboards, affinity diagrams, top ten tasks, personas…it might all seem overwhelming.
Remember this: Your goal is to meet real users, immerse yourself in their world, and gather
as much detail as you can on their tasks. If you do that in any form, your team will be on the
road to designing better products. And, you are bound to enjoy the process, because you
will have formed a personal connection with your audience and you will be able to design
from a position of knowledge.

chapter five:
appendix
A Common Sense Approach for Discovering User Needs References and Bibliography
References and Bibliography

Baecker, R. and Buxton, W. Readings in Human-Computer Interaction: A Multidisciplinary Approach. Los
Altos, CA: Morgan Kaufmann, 1987.
Bauersfeld, P. Software by Design: Creating People Friendly Software. New York, NY: M&T Books, 1994.
Carroll, J. (Ed.) Scenario-Based Design: Envisioning Work and Technology in System Development. New
York, NY: John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 1995.
CHI Conference Proceedings. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. (Proceedings published annually since
1983 by ACM’s SIGCHI.)
Hackos, J. and Redish, J. User and Task Analysis for Interface Design. New York, NY: John Wiley & Sons
Ltd., 1998.
Holtzblatt, K. and Beyer, H., (Eds.) Communications of the ACM. May 1995, Vol. 38, No. 5. (Theme of the
issue is “Requirements Gathering: The Human Factor.”)
Gardiner, M. and Christie, B. Applying Cognitive Psychology to User-Interface Design. New York, NY: John
Wiley & Sons Ltd., 1987.
Gomoll, K. “Some Techniques for Observing Users” from The Art of Human-Computer Interface Design,
Brenda Laurel, editor. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, Inc., 1990.
Greenbaum, J. and Kyng, M. (Eds.) Design at Work. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Earlbaum Associates, 1991.
Laurel, Brenda, (Ed.) The Art of Human-Computer Interface Design. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley
Publishing Company, Inc., 1990.
Muller, M. and Kuhn, S., (Eds.) Communications of the ACM. June 1993, Vol. 36, No. 4. (Theme of the
issue is participatory design.)
Norman, D. Design of Everyday Things (formerly Psychology of Everyday Things). New York: Basic
Books, Inc. Publishers, 1988.
Stone, D., Jarrett, C., Woodroffe, M., and Minocha, S. User Interface Design and Evaluation. San
Francisco, CA: Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, The Open University, 2005.
Schuler, D. and Namioka, A. (Eds.) Participatory Design: Principles and Practices. Hillsdale, NJ. Lawrence
Earlbaum Associates, 1993.
Wixon, D. and Ramey, J. Field Methods Casebook for Software Design. New York, NY: John Wiley &
Sons Ltd., 1996.

A Common Sense Approach for Discovering User Needs Phone Screener
Phone Screener:
Investors (recruit 5)
{Recruiting firm’s opening greeting}
We are recruiting people to participate in a study of how people do online investing. We are offering $150 to
people who participate in our study as a token of our appreciation. If this interests you, I have a few qualifying
questions to ask.
(If interested)
• The following questions help us find participants with various profiles.

• Based on your answers, you may or may not be asked to participate further.
Recruit Name:
Phone:
Address:
Gender: [ ] Male
[ ] Female WANT 2+
1. Do you send and receive electronic mail? YES NO If NO: TERMINATE
2. Do you make purchases over the Internet? YES NO If NO: TERMINATE
3. How long have you been using the Web? _____________

4. If 6 – 12 months answered for previous question:
Do you visit your brokerage site(s) at least once per month? YES NO If NO: TERMINATE
5. If 3+ years: Do you use the Web daily? YES NO If NO: TERMINATE
For what purpose: _______________________________________
If YES: Do you visit your brokerage site(s) at least once per week? YES NO If NO: TERMINATE
6. Where do you access your online brokerage most frequently? HOME OFFICE
WANT 3+ who access from HOME
7. On an annual basis, do you make more than 30 trades? YES NO If YES: TERMINATE
(through all channels: branch, online, phone, bank, broker-assisted)
8. Do you have $25,000 in liquid assets to invest in one way or YES NO If NO: TERMINATE
another?
9. If YES to the previous question: Do you have $200,000 or more YES NO
in liquid assets?
WANT 2+
10. Are you currently retired? YES NO
WANT 1+
11. Which is your age category? WANT 2+ of 36 – 56
18 – 25 46 – 56
26 – 35 57 – 65
36 – 45 66 or older

A Common Sense Approach for Discovering User Needs Phone Screener
Qualify…
Based on your answers, we’d like for you to participate in our study.
Here’s how it works…
• Two or three researchers will visit you in your home/office, depending upon where you access your
online
brokerage most frequently. They will observe as you work through online investing tasks. This should
take 1½-2 hours. They will:
video tape
take pictures
ask questions
take notes
ask you to fill out a couple questionnaires
• What are some convenient dates for the visit?

_________________________________________
_________________________________________
_________________________________________
• The researchers would like to visit with you where you normally do your online investing.
Is that your HOME or your OFFICE?
_________________________________________
• Let me give you a contact name and phone number:

{lead researcher name}
{phone}
Don’t qualify…
• Sorry…we already have participants with your same profile.

• Thank you for taking the time to speak with me and answer the survey.

A Common Sense Approach for Discovering User Needs Recruiting Script
Recruiting Script
The recruiter should use the following information. This script covers the purpose of the study, and an
outline for the visit.
Overview
We are beginning by doing a research study of the work process. We are asking sites like yours to
participate in our study. When we can observe work as it takes place, and ask questions of the people
doing the work, we can design better products to support that work.
We are interested in understanding the workflow, from receiving the work to reporting the results. We also
want to understand the needs of project managers.
In general, participating in our study means:

• A team of 4 researchers will visit your site for one day.
• We are most interested in observing people as they perform work tasks. We will also interview them
and ask them to fill out 1 – 2 short surveys — taking care to minimize the interruption to their work.
• We will interview managers to understand program goals and future trends.
• We will audiotape conversations for a backup to written notes.
• We would like permission to take photographs of the environment and steps in the work process.
Because many members of our design and development team have never been in a work site,
showing them pictures helps them understand the environment into which new products will be
used. The pictures communicate an added level of information. The pictures will be confidential and
will be used solely for research purposes.
• We would like to take copies of reports, forms or other artifacts that support the work. Of course, we
are not interested in confidential information and will take appropriate steps to block out confidential
information from anything that you authorize for us to take.
As a thank-you for your participation, we will order pizza for you and your personnel to enjoy on your
lunch break. We will need an area (perhaps a break room) to set out the pizza.
Details
We want to meet with various personnel to interview them and/or observe them doing their work.
Site Manager (1 hour)
We want to understand your perspective of current and future program goals for the site. We will do
the following during our meeting:
• Administer demographics survey.
• Ask questions regarding program goals (present and future) and general information about work
processes.
• Audiotape for a backup to written notes.

A Common Sense Approach for Discovering User Needs Recruiting Script
Workers (1 – 2 hours)
We will meet with workers in 3 different roles to understand how their individual work fits into the larger
workflow.
With each worker, the researchers will:

• Administer demographics survey.
• Administer task-ranking survey.
• Observe key tasks in detail and take notes.
• Ask questions about the work tasks and processes.
• Collect copies of reports, forms or other artifacts that support the work.
• Audiotape conversations for a backup to written notes.
• Take photographs of the site and the participants as they perform work tasks.
Additional Forms and Surveys
We want to collect demographic information and task rankings from more personnel than we can meet.
We’ll ask people to fill out these forms during their lunch break while they enjoy the pizza that we bring
in.
Scheduling
We’d like to ask your help in determining the most appropriate day of the week to visit your site. We want
to see as many steps in the work process as possible; however, we don’t want to cause distractions during
your busiest times. During our visit, we’ll want to meet with the people listed above at times when we can
observe them doing their key work.

A Common Sense Approach for Discovering User Needs Demographics Questionnaire
Demographics Questionnaire
By answering the following questions, you will help us create an accurate picture of your background and
the work you do.
Please provide your contact information so that we can call you with other questions, if necessary.
Responding to the survey should only take a few minutes. Please help us by completing this survey.
Name:_________________________________________________________________________________
Location:_______________________________________________________________________________
Job Title:_______________________________________________________________________________
Phone:_________________________________________________________________________________
Date:_ _________________________________________________________________________________
Thank you for your help.

Work experience & Tools
1. Job title:_ _____________________________________________________________________________
2. Job description — Please describe the major aspects of your work. Be specific.
______________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________
3. Education:
______________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________
4. How long have you been in this job role?

o Less than 6 months
o 6 months to 1 year
o 1 to 2 years
o 3 to 4 years
o 5 to 10 years
o More than 10 years
5. How many total years of experience do you have in project management?

o Less than 6 months
o 6 months to 1 year
o 1 to 2 years
o 3 to 4 years
o 5 to 10 years
o More than 10 years
6. How would you rate yourself as a user of your current computer technology?
o Novice
o Average
o Expert
7. What tools and technology do you use in your work? (Please include any software tools, as well as
phone, PDA, paper forms, etc.)
______________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________

Personal Profile
8. Gender:
o Female
o Male
9. Age:
o 18 – 25
o 26 – 35
o 36 – 45
o 46 – 55
o 56 – 65
o 66 +

A Common Sense Approach for Discovering User Needs Informed Consent Form
Informed Consent Form
I volunteer to participate in a research study being conducted for the purpose of gathering
information for the ABC Workflow Project.
I agree to be videotaped during this interview. I am aware that the videotape will be used for
analyzing and understanding the information from this study. I grant the sponsor and its affiliates
the right to use the videotape and any information I provide for the purposes of this study only, and
not for commercial purposes.
The sponsor will not use my name, any information I provide, or any video of me for any purpose
other than to review the session, analyze the results, and communicate the findings within the e-
learning design and development team.
I understand that any information I acquire about future product design is confidential and
proprietary. I agree not to talk about any product design to anyone. I understand that I may tell
people only that I participated in a research study.
Name (print): _______________________________________________________________
Signature: __________________________________________________________________
Date: ____________________________________________________________________
Witness: ____________________________________________________________________

A Common Sense Approach for Discovering User Needs Interview & Observation Script
Interview & Observation Script
Name: _____________________________________________________________________________
Location:___________________________________________________________________________
Date:_ _____________________________________________________________________________
Purpose of our visit
We want to understand how you are doing your work. Today, we’ll interview you, and observe you
as you go about your tasks. Let me reassure you that we are not here to evaluate you in any way. We
are here to learn from you.
Before we start, I want to make sure you are comfortable with the interview and observation process.
Here are some things to note:
• The interview and observation will take 1 – 2 hours.
• Your participation in the interview is voluntary. So, if you’re uncomfortable with any of the
questions, we can skip it or stop altogether. We are grateful to get any information you are
willing to share with us.
• We’d like to audio record our discussion as a back-up to our written notes, and take some
pictures as you work, if that is all right with you.
Any questions before we start?

Demographics
We are collecting demographic information about all of the people we interview. We will use this
information to create a composite “profile” of all the people who participate in our study. Would you
mind filling out this short survey?
[Have them fill out the DEMOGRAPHIC QUESTIONNAIRE.]
Overview
Would you describe a typical workday for yourself?
_______________________________________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________________________________
What are the 3 things you like MOST about your work?
_______________________________________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________________________________

What are the 3 things you like LEAST about your work?
_______________________________________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________________________________
What kind of training did you receive for this work?
_______________________________________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________________________________
How is your job performance measured?
_______________________________________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________________________________

Work/Processes
Could you give us an overview of your work process?
_______________________________________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________________________________
What other people do you interact with as you work?
_______________________________________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________________________________
How many projects per day do you typically work on?
_______________________________________________________________________________________
When do you actually get involved in a project?
_______________________________________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________________________________

How often do you contact clients? How is the contact made?
_______________________________________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________________________________
Do you ever visit clients?
_______________________________________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________________________________

What information do you get at the beginning of the project?
Where does it come from and in what format?
What happens if any data is missing?
_______________________________________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________________________________
With whom do you interact? In what capacity? For what purpose?
Do you send anything to anyone?

Client:_ ________________________________________________________________________________
Manager:_______________________________________________________________________________
Team members:_________________________________________________________________________
Administrator: _ _________________________________________________________________________
Legal Counsel: __________________________________________________________________________
Other:__________________________________________________________________________________
How much time do you spend talking with clients on the phone?
What do you discuss?
__________________________________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________________________________
Can you show us some of your most typical project management tasks?
What information is collected with each activity?

How is data captured/stored?
Who uses it and how?
Probe into data needs. We want to know:

WHAT data parameters are used by
WHOM and
WHEN in the process.]

What other information would be nice to have in doing your work?
__________________________________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________________________________
What do you see as the biggest bottlenecks to performing your work?
What are your biggest frustrations?
__________________________________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________________________________
Is there any part of the work process that is prone to errors?
What is the cause?
How are errors identified and corrected? (Or, prevented?)
__________________________________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________________________________

Technology
How does your technology support your work?
_________________________________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________________________________
How does your technology not support your work?
_________________________________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________________________________
What part of the project management work process should be automated or handled by software that
currently is not?
_________________________________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________________________________
What part of the work process should NOT be automated or
handled by software?
_________________________________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________________________________

What are the 3 things you like MOST about your current technology?
_________________________________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________________________________
What are the 3 things you like LEAST about your current technology?
_________________________________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________________________________
Thank you for your time.

Manager:
Task Survey — Importance
Site:
85
Tasks ¸ 1 – 10 Tasks ¸ 1 – 10
Test Results Follow-on Testing
Please fill out the table Obtain/gather test results (trigger: batch, ad hoc) Request additional testing
by doing the following:
Verify if test is initial or repeat Request confirmatory tests
1. Indicate the tasks Review test results Obtain repeat test sample
that your personnel
www.uie.com
Obtain confirmatory test results
perform on a regular
basis by placing a
checkmark in the ¸
column.
You decide what

“regular basis” is
— perhaps it’s weekly,
perhaps daily.
Individual Test Results Reporting Counsel Client
If tasks are performed Call client with results Review case file before client appointment
that are not listed, Call agency with results
please write them in
blank spaces in the Write letter to client
first column. Write letter to agency
Fax letter to client
2. Using the tasks that
you’ve marked (¸ ), Fax letter to agency
number them in order Consult with agency via phone (explain meaning of results)
of importance; where
Retrieve results per phone request
1 = most important,
10 = least important.
Use each number only
once.

Data Compilation and Reporting

Compile list of abnormal results.
A Common Sense Approach for Discovering User Needs Task Survey - Importance

©2007 User Interface Engineering. Reproduction Prohibited

Worker:
Task Survey — Frequency
Site:
Tasks ¸ 1 – 10 Tasks ¸ 1 – 10
Test Results Follow-on Testing
Please fill out the table Obtain/gather test results (trigger: batch, ad hoc) Request additional testing
by doing the following:
Verify if test is initial or repeat Request confirmatory tests
1. Indicate the tasks Review test results Obtain repeat test sample
that your personnel Obtain confirmatory test results
perform on a regular
basis by placing a
checkmark in the ¸
column.
You decide what

“regular basis” is
— perhaps it’s weekly, Individual Test Results Reporting Counsel Client
perhaps daily.

Call client with results Review case file before client appointment
If tasks are performed Call agency with results
that are not listed, Write letter to client
please write them in
Write letter to agency
blank spaces in the
first column. Fax letter to client
Fax letter to agency
2. Using the tasks that
you’ve marked (¸ ), Consult with agency via phone (explain meaning of results)
number them in order Retrieve results per phone request
of how often; where 1
= most frequent,
10 = least frequent.
Use each number only
once.

Data Compilation and Reporting

Compile list of abnormal results.
www.uie.com
86
A Common Sense Approach for Discovering User Needs Task Survey - Frequency

A Common Sense Approach for Discovering User Needs Satisfaction Survey
Satisfaction Survey
Participant name: _______________________________________
For each statement, check the box that indicates strongly strongly
how strongly you agree (5), or disagree (1). disagree agree

1 2 3 4 5
In general, the {product name} screens are
visually appealing.
Comments:
I find it difficult to accomplish tasks with

{product name}.
Comments:
It is generally easy to find the information and

features I need.
Comments:
Overall, I find using {product name} to be an

enjoyable experience.
Comments:
The performance of {product name} is too slow.

Comments:
I would prefer to use more simplified software,

even if it meant giving up features.
Comments:
{Product name} needlessly complex.

Comments:
Overall, I find {product name} to be easy to use.

Comments:
{Product name} behaves in unpredictable ways.

Comments:
Most people should be able to learn to use

{product name} quickly.
Comments:

A Common Sense Approach for Discovering User Needs Observation Notes
Observation Notes
Site:_______________________________ Worker:____________________________________________
TASK:_________________________________________________________________________________
Input Data Parameters Source Output Data Parameters Recipient
Steps . . . Problem areas . . . Observations:

A Common Sense Approach for Discovering User Needs Audio Diary Instructions
Audio Diary Instructions

Please use the tape recorder to make comments each time you respond to a technical support
problem. At the beginning of the tape, record your name. Then, for each support call record the
following:
• Date and time.

• Problem you are trying to solve.
• What you tried to do to solve the problem.
• Where you looked for help.
• Did you solve the problem?
• Was it easy or difficult to find the information you needed? Why?
• Comments about the experience. How satisfied were you with the electronic support tools
available to you?
The following instructions are taped to your recorder.
When you are solving a problem, please record:
1. Date and time.

2. Problem.
3. What you tried.
4. Where you looked for help.
5. Was problem solved?
6. Easy?...Difficult?
7. Comments.
Also, feel free to record any other comments you have about any aspect of your problem-solving
experience. We are interested in any comments you have. You might think of this as making a
documentary of your computer problem-solving activities.
We’d like you to record a minimum of 20 incidents in a minimum time period of 5 working days
(don’t worry if you have more). When you have recorded approximately 20 incidents, please mail
your audio tapes to us in the pre-addressed envelope we provide. When we receive your tapes, we
will send you $150 as a thank-you for your participation.
If it helps you keep track, you can use this checklist to count your support incidents:
__ 1 __ 6 __ 11 __ 16
__ 2 __ 7 __ 12 __ 17
__ 3 __ 8 __ 13 __ 18
__ 4 __ 9 __ 14 __ 19
__ 5 __ 10 __ 15 __ 20
We would like you to return the tapes as you fill them up. You may keep the tape recorder.

A Common Sense Approach for Discovering User Needs Follow-Up Interview
Follow-up Interview
1. How often did you use the product?
2. Where were you when you used it?
3. How much of the usage was for work; how much for personal?
4. What is your overall impression of the product?
5. How well did it work for you?
6. What did you find most frustrating?
7. What did you like the most?
8. What features would you add or remove?

A Common Sense Approach for Discovering User Needs Letter to Site Contacts
Letter to site Contacts
ABC Site
123 Main Street, Heartland, USA
November 2, 2006
Dear Mr. Smith,
Thank you for agreeing to participate in our research study. When we can observe work as it takes place, and
ask questions of the people doing the work, we can design better products to support that work. Thank you for
partnering with us in this effort.
Our team of 24 researchers is scheduled to be at your laboratory on:

Monday, November 13, 2006 from 10:00 AM – 3:00 PM
Here is an overview of the activities for the day:

• We are most interested in observing people as they perform work tasks. We will also interview them and ask them
to fill out 1 – 2 short surveys — taking care to minimize the interruption to their work.
• We will interview managers to understand program goals and future trends.
• We will audiotape conversations for a backup to written notes.
• We would like permission to take photographs of the environment and steps in the work process. Because many
members of our design and development team have never been in a work site, showing them pictures helps
them understand the environment where products will be used. The pictures communicate an added level of
information. The pictures will be confidential and will be used solely for research purposes.
• We would like to take copies of reports, forms or other artifacts that support the work. Of course, we are not
interested in confidential information and will take appropriate steps to block out confidential information from
anything that you authorize for us to take.
As a thank-you for your participation, we will order pizza for you and your personnel to enjoy during the lunch
break. We will need an area (perhaps a break room) to set out the pizza. We want to collect demographic
information and task rankings from more personnel than we can meet, so we’ll ask people to fill out these forms
during their lunch break while they enjoy the pizza.
We want to meet with various personnel to interview them and/or observe them doing their work. These are the
people we’ll meet with:
• Site Manager......to understand current and future program goals for the site...............................................(1 hour)
• Role 1..................to understand how work comes into the site and how it is set up for processing.... (1 – 2 hours)
• Role 2..................to understand how the work is performed and how results are communicated...... (1 – 2 hours)
• Role 3..................to understand the data included, how it is stored, who uses it, and how.................. (1 – 2 hours)
It is important that we see the work environment and each individual’s workstation in a normal state. Please inform
the people we will meet with that it is not necessary to “clean up” their work area. It is a natural reaction for people
to do so when they are expecting visitors. However, we are interested in what types of things people surround
themselves with to accomplish their work. So, we would like to see what their work area looks like on a typical day.
Again, thank you for participating in our study. We look forward to seeing you soon.
Sincerely,
Mary Jones

A Common Sense Approach for Discovering User Needs Incremental Site Report
Incremental Site Report

XYZ Brokerage Field Study — Incremental Report
Mary C., Customer
Los Angeles
Began investing one and a half years ago, but grew up in an environment where
stocks were a common topic of conversation. Very risky, investing only in technology
stocks, usually on margin. Makes 260+ trades per year.
Mary is a young, single, self-employed attorney who lives and works in Los Angeles. She averages over 5
trades per week (260+ per year), but recently has been making only 1 – 3 trades per week. She’s had less
time to trade during the day because she’s covering the case load for an attorney who recently quit. Also,
she’s been on vacation for several weeks recently.
Mary trades only technology stocks, and she considers herself a very risky investor. She buys on margin
usually, and currently has a $50,000 margin debt. She has a SEP IRA and a Roth IRA, in conjuction
with her brokerage account. She does not trade options. Even though Mary has been investing for
only one and a half years, she grew up in a family where stocks and investing was a common topic of
conversation, so she feels she knew more than the average beginner before she got started. Both her
father and her brother are active traders, and she discusses investments with them often.
Mary began investing to build a down payment for a house. She is still looking for a house to buy. In the
year and a half that she’s been investing, her goals have evolved to include saving for retirement and for
a career change. Mary thinks she might like to do something different in the future (like being a writer)
and is sure it will pay much less than being an attorney. To achieve her goals, she invests as much as she
possibly can, keeping a small balance in her check book to cover day-to-day expenses.
On her home computer, Mary has installed XYZ SuperSoftware, but she doesn’t use it as much as XYZ
Brokerage.com. She had the XYZ SuperSoftware software on her work computer also, but she recently
got a different computer and has not reinstalled the software yet.
Mary likes paper records. She keeps all of her

confirmations and account statements in binders at
home. In her day planner, she has several tabbed
sections of notes where she records information such as
deposits to her account, trades made and stocks that she
is watching.

Demographics
Age........................................................... 36 – 45
Education................................................ Law degree
Job title.................................................... Attorney
Annual salary.......................................... $100,000 – 120,000
Web user................................................. 2 years

Most-frequent Web access.................... Work
Personal hours on Web per day........... 1
Business hours on Web per day........... 0
Hours using e-mail per day................... 15 minutes
Connection speed.................................. DSL
Other Internet devices........................... None
Investment vehicles............................... $60,000 SEP IRA, $12,000 Roth IRA, $50,000 brokerage
Stock investor......................................... 1 year, 260+ trades per year
Traditional brokerage............................ No
Online brokerage(s).............................. XYZ Brokerage
Favorite Web sites.................................. XYZ Brokerage.com
Sources of investor information........... Father, brother, friends, business section of local newspaper, XYZ
Brokerage magazine, Silicon Valley News television show,
financial shows when channel surfing, XYZ Brokerage.com
news articles and charts
Tasks by Importance
Ranking Task Frequency Time

1 Trade stocks Few times weekly AM
2 Run real-time quotes 3 times daily AM
3 Run charts 3 times daily AM
4 Read financial articles online Once daily AM
5 Monitor portfolio positions and balances Twice daily AM
6 Check watch list (paper-based) Twice daily AM
7 Set up alerts or other automatic information Monthly PM
8 Set up watch lists or customize research Monthly PM
9 Check balance Twice daily AM
10 Verify deposits/withdrawals Monthly PM
Look up symbols Weekly PM
Read alerts Once daily PM
Read analyst reports Weekly PM
Run delayed quotes Once daily PM

Tasks by Frequency
Frequency Task Importance Ranking Time

3 times daily Run real-time quotes 2 AM
3 times daily Run charts 3 AM
Twice daily Monitor portfolio positions and balances 5 AM
Twice daily Check watch list (paper-based) 6 AM
Twice daily Check balance 9 AM
Once daily Read financial articles online 4 AM
Once daily Read alerts PM
Once daily Run delayed quotes PM
Few times weekly Trade stocks 1 AM
Weekly Look up symbols PM
Weekly Read analyst reports PM
Monthly Set up alerts or other automatic information 7 PM
Monthly Set up watch lists or customize research 8 PM
Monthly Verify deposits/withdrawals 10 PM
Web Usage
In her office, Mary has a Sony VAIO with DVD that someone else in the office complex gave to her as
an upgrade to her previous computer. She has a 17” monitor and an HP LaserJet IIIp, as well.
Mary has been using the Web for 2 years. She feels that her computer knowledge in general is limited;
although, she seemed quite comfortable exploring and using the computer when we observed her
perform tasks. XYZ Brokerage.com is the only web site she uses. She uses her computer only for
investing and to view software for her job.
When asked to recall a task that she had to quit or suspend on XYZ Brokerage.com, she said that 2
or 3 times trades did not go through. She wasn’t sure why. She called customer service to resolve the
problem. “Something I was doing wrong.”
Brokerage Shopping
Mary opened her first XYZ Brokerage account just over a year ago. Mary never expected to trade
online. When she opened her account, the XYZ Brokerage representative gave her some print
material regarding XYZ Brokerage.com. She didn’t think she’d use the site because her computer
experience is very limited. But, when she read the information, she found that online trading was
cheaper and it looked like it would be pretty easy. Prior to going online, she was frustrated with being
on hold when she’d call to trade. She also liked that she could get company-specific news online.

The features that are most important to Mary on XYZ Brokerage.com are news, charts, account history,
positions and balance. Mary is not really interested in changing brokerages, but price might get her to
switch in the future. She’s glad that the commission was recently lowered on XYZ Brokerage.com.
Information Sources, Flow and Decision Making
Mary does all of her investing on the Web at XYZ Brokerage.com. On rare occasion, if she encounters
a computer problem or if she is traveling and away from her computers, she will call customer service
to place a trade. Her primary sources of information are her father and her brother, who are active
traders also. When her dad tells her she should buy something, she will just do it because she knows he
does all the necessary research and she trusts him. She also gets information from friends who work at
technology companies, the business section of the local newspaper, the Silicon Valley News television
program and other financial programs that she might find while channel surfing.
Mary does not read or post to message boards, nor does she use web site demos. She didn’t know what
they were. She does not use any personalized sites either.
Mary likes paper records. She keeps confirmations and account statements in binders at home. She
transfers the statement data to an Excel spreadsheet for her tax accountant.
In her day planner, she has several tabbed sections of notes

where she records information like trades made and stocks to
watch. She likes having access to this information when away
from her computer.
Mary tried keeping watch lists online, but didn’t like that
method because she is so used to writing everything in her day
planner. She said she might try online watch lists again in the
future.
In the evenings, Mary often talks with her father and sometimes her brother. They discuss stocks. The
next morning, Mary watches the market, runs charts and reads news articles online on particular stocks.
She places market orders from work during the morning once she decides to buy or sell. Occasionally, if
her dad or brother gives her a specific buy/sell tip, she’ll make the trade from home before she leaves for
work. Mary does the more general research on companies in the evening (analyst or earnings reports).
She also updates her alerts at the end of the day to add new companies that she’s interested in.
Mary does not seek out advice from financial professionals. She has a lot of friends who work in Silicon
Valley. She learns about technology companies from her friends. She wants her money to be in different
areas of technology and telecommunications — e.g., semi-conductors, software, wireless, fiber-optic, etc.
She looks for sectors that make practical sense. For example, she’s heard a lot in the news about hackers
breeching computer systems. So, investing in companies that produce security software makes sense
to Mary. She also invests in companies that are the “pillars of the Internet,” like Cisco and Intel (versus
Yahoo or Amazon). Mary decides when to buy or sell based on earnings estimates. She gets earnings

reports from her father, who gets them from his broker, by calling XYZ Brokerage customer service,
or from the Analyst Info on XYZ Brokerage.com — “but I’m not good at using that [Analyst Info].”
Sometimes, she will buy and sell the same stock several times. Mary also watches her holdings to see
which stocks “weather the storm” of the market volatility to decide whether to sell or to buy more.
Mary visits XYZ Brokerage.com a couple of times each day, mostly in the mornings. She first checks
her positions on her 3 accounts to see how particular stocks are doing. She refers to the watch list in
her day planner, and then runs quotes on several of the stocks. She also checks margin calls. Mary
does not look at the home page, going right for the Login button — “What is the home page?” She
didn’t know how to get back to the home page once she was logged in.
If she could customize a home page, Mary would include the market summary, everything on the
login page, hottest news of the day in the technology industry, quotes with news and charts, positions
and quick access to a watch list. She’d also like the watch list to update automatically. For example,
after selling a stock it stays on her watch list for 2 months. If there are no inquiries on that stock, like
running quotes, it should be removed. Or, one month after selling, a prompt should ask, “Do you
want to drop this stock from your watch list?”
Task Clicks — Trade Stocks on XYZ Brokerage.com
• Selects bookmark for XYZ Brokerage.

• Clicks Login button without looking at any other part of the Home Page.
• Logs into Positions page of brokerage account by default.
• Reviews the positions information.
• Gets Quotes for several companies.
• Looks at Charts and News.
• Decides whether to use available money in account or to buy on margin.
• Decides whether to buy a new stock or to buy more of an equity she already owns.
• Clicks Trade link on line item for one of her positions.
• Fills trade page fields.
• Clicks Submit button.
• Clicks Order Status link to make sure order is filled.
• Opens day timer and logs transaction on appropriate note page (date, time, what bought).
Task Clicks — Research on XYZ Brokerage.com
• Selects XYZ Brokerage.com from the recently used URLs drop-down list on the browser.
• Clicks Login button.
• Logs in to Positions (her default start page).
• Enters ticker symbol for Quote.
• Clicks Chart link in Quote bar.
• Selects 5-day chart and reviews.
• Clicks News link in Quote bar.
• Reads latest articles.

If she doesn’t know much about a company, or if she wants to validate information from another
source (like a friend), she’ll use the Analyst Info page:
• Clicks Quotes & Research tab.

• Clicks Analyst Info link.
• Enters symbol and clicks Go button.
• Clicks Earnings Estimates and downloads.
• Clicks Earnings Valuations and downloads.
• Clicks Analyst Reports and downloads desired report(s).
Experience and Satisfaction with XYZ Brokerage
Mary feels that XYZ Brokerage.com is “hard to deal with conceptually.” She indicated that working
with multiple accounts is difficult, and that updating watch lists is a lot of work and a hassle. She’d
like her watch list to update as she trades. She reads about features in mailings from XYZ Brokerage,
but can’t always find them on the site. Mary feels that there is more information, advice and guidance
available than she knows how to access. She said she’d like someone to show her how. But, she feels
that the features she’s learned and uses most are easy to use. Trades are done quickly. Checking order
status and running quotes were easy to learn.
When asked whether she uses quick links, Mary first said she didn’t know what they were. When she
saw them on a page, she said, “Oh, this! Yeah, great, you don’t have to click as many places. They’re
convenient.” Later, she wondered why quick links aren’t on every page.
Mary does not use any help features on XYZ Brokerage.com. She likes the terminology used on the
site. She likes the XYZ Brokerage magazine even more, using the glossary there. She also finds the
people on the phone to be helpful.
Prior to getting the DSL, Mary was frustrated by the slowness of working with the site. The slowness
problem is part of the reason why she stopped using and updating her watch list online. Because
of her inexperience with computers, she didn’t initially realize that most of the problem was with
her hardware and not the site itself. She even installed XYZ SuperSoftware because it looked more
user-friendly and simple, but found that it didn’t solve the slowness problem. She thought trading
was easier on XYZ SuperSoftware and that the graphics were easier to look at, but she didn’t like
refreshing the data. Once she got the DSL and solved the slowness problem, she didn’t see any
advantages to using XYZ SuperSoftware over XYZ Brokerage.com. (She has not installed XYZ
SuperSoftware on her new work computer.)
Mary mentioned a problem with multiple trades that really frustrates her. After she places the first
trade, she checks the order status. From the order status page, she says she clicks the Trade button
to place another trade. When she checks the order status of the second trade, she says there is not
a Trade button anymore. So, she can’t place a third trade from the order status page. In essence,
she says, it’s difficult to check the order status between trades when trying to make multiple trades
quickly.

A Common Sense Approach for Discovering User Needs “Day in the Life” Scenario
A “Day in the Life” Scenario:

A Day of a Medical Technician
1. Getting set up for the day
Maintenance
Medical technicians who operate automated testing machines begin their shift by performing
maintenance on their assigned machine. Each machine has daily, weekly and monthly maintenance.
Technicians look at a schedule on the machine’s computer or on paper schedule to know which
maintenance is due. When completed, they log into the computer, or mark a paper log, that they’ve
done the maintenance.
Quality Control
Prior to running any tests each day, technicians must run controls. For the machines, technicians run
a batch of controls to make sure that the machine is providing accurate readings. For manual tests,
control samples are included with each batch. In many cases, 3 positive and 3 negative controls are
run, but the number of controls varies for the different types of tests.
2. Performing the work
Testing
The technicians’ primary work task is to run tests. They print their work list, usually from the LIS, and
then gather the samples for the tests on their work list. Samples are delivered to their workbench or a
common area, but there often are a few missing. The technicians doing manual tests renumber their
work lists if they are still missing samples so that they can match each order to the appropriate tube in
a numbered tray.
Technicians who run machines prepare the samples and place them on carriers, which fit on the
machine they are operating. The carriers are modular, so the technician can place new samples on
the machine while others are processing. Technicians often move about the lab to get new samples
and printouts, enter results into or verify results on the LIS system, etc. They juggle batches of tests in
various states of completion.
Technicians who do manual tests gather the appropriate test kit for the test they are running. Each
test varies, but typical steps include: dilute the sample, add a reagent, incubate, add a conjugate,
incubate again, read results, and enter the results into the LIS. These technicians spend periods of
time sitting at their bench performing tedious tasks and timing incubations.
When tests are complete, technicians file printed test results and their work lists in binders or files.
Many labs keep this paperwork for anywhere from two months to seven years.

A Common Sense Approach for Discovering User Needs “Day in the Life” Scenario
Calibration
Each time a new lot of reagents is opened, the medical technicians must perform calibration. Using
the automated testing machines, they run controls from the new lot to establish the high, medium
and low readings. Some manual tests also require calibration using controls from the new reagent.
3. Cleaning up at the end of the day
Technicians need to clean up at the end of the day. They do the following types of activities: clean
up their bench area, store specimens in the refrigerator/freezer (separating out positive samples), and
validate test results. They may print the “incomplete” work list to see if any specimens were missed, if
any test results need validating, and to see what the next day’s work load will be like. They also pass
things on to the next shift.

Storyboard of the scenario
Send literature

1 2 3
Lucy works in the Marketing department of the She reviews the copy of the questionnaire to make Next, Lucy brings up CC to view her task list.
same company as Ed, the inside sales associate. sure all the pages are there. Then, she labels a She sees the line item for Big Enterprises and
She’s received a pile of questionnaires from Ed and paper file folder with the company name: Big double-clicks it.
the other inside sales associates. She chooses one Enterprises.
to work on.

www.uie.com 100
Storyboard of the Scenario
Send literature
101 www.uie.com
4 5 6
The sales opportunity opens. Lucy clicks View Lucy goes to the Window menu in CC to bring After closing the sales opportunity window,
Owner to get the company record for Big the sales opportunity back into view. She double- Lucy clicks the Literature tab on the Big
Enterprises. She double-checks that the data checks the information on this window as well. Enterprises company record.
entered is the same as what’s on the questionnaire. Everything is fine.
It’s fine.
Comments — If the field sales people were entering

the questionnaire information directly into CC, errors
would be reduced and the double-checking could be
eliminated.


Send literature

7 8 9
Lucy clicks the “+” button to start a new order. A window opens where Lucy selects which The order window closes, leaving the Big
documents she wants to ship to Big Enterprises. Enterprises customer record showing. Lucy is
She clicks the “Prospect presentations” item in finished with this task, so she clicks the Task
the list of literature. Under that item are several Management icon to get back to her task list
pieces of literature. Lucy selects them all. She so she can process the next literature order.
accepts the default shipping method of “US Mail.”
(The customer’s address is also displayed in the
window.) Then, she clicks OK to submit the order.
Comments — Several users commented that it is

difficult to find specific pieces of literature because
the hierarchical list is so large.
www.uie.com 102
A Common Sense Approach for Discovering User Needs Photo Storyboard
PHOTO STORYBOARD

A Common Sense Approach for Discovering User Needs Photo Storyboard

A Common Sense Approach for Discovering User Needs Top 10 Tasks
Top-10 Tasks
This Top-10 Tasks list combines importance rankings (from managers) and frequency
rankings (from agents). This list will help us prioritize features for the new call center
software. The list will also help us prioritize our design activities and provide key tasks
for usability testing.
1. Add new customer / install.
2. Create service call.
3. Give product information.
4. Explain charges / fees.
5. Educate customer on service details.
6. Enter customer comments.
7. Offer additional products by studying a customer’s account.
8. Explain how to use equipment.
9. Telemarketing. (Call prospects to offer specific products.)
10. Update account information

A Common Sense Approach for Discovering User Needs Sum of Inverses
Sum of Inverses -- example
Frequency Frequency user1 user2 user3

List of tasks

Task B 1 2.500 1 1 2
Task C 2 1.700 2 5 1
Task D 3 1.033 5 2 3
Task A 4 0.917 3 3 4
Task E 5 0.700 4 4 5
Task F 6 0.458 6 8 6
Task G 7 0.452 7 6 7
Task H 8 0.393 8 7 8
Note: Column C rankings are entered manually after sorting data

by column D (sum of inverses) in descending order.

A Common Sense Approach for Discovering User Needs Timelines
TIMELINES

about the authors

A Common Sense Approach for Discovering User Needs Author Biographies
Author Biographies
Kate Gomoll
Kate Gomoll is Principal and founder of Gomoll Research &

Design, a consulting firm specializing in user experience design.
Gomoll Research & Design has conducted customer research for
a broad range of clients, including: Charles Schwab, Compaq,
DirecTV, Hewlett-Packard, GE Healthcare, Onyx Software,
Netscape, and MSN TV. Kate’s user observation guidelines have
appeared in The Art of Human Computer Interface Design and
The Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines.
Kate teaches customer research methods at conferences and workshops worldwide. For
seven years, she taught field study methods as part of a three-day workshop for UCLA
Extension.
Kate has a BA in Psychology from the University of Wisconsin–Eau Claire and an

interdisciplinary MA in Professional Writing from Carnegie Mellon University.
Ellen Story Church
Ellen Story Church has worked in the field of software

development and design since 1985. While working at
Northwestern Mutual, she was one of the first to practice
usability engineering at the company. She became a user
interface design specialist, a new specialty for the company,
and in that capacity, she educated teams on the user-centered
design process and principles of good design. Ellen later
joined Metavante in the role of human interface designer where she conducted research
at user sites, created human interface models, developed detailed window designs, and
participated in usability testing for financial services software.
Since joining Gomoll Research & Design, Ellen has helped numerous clients with field
research, interface design, prototyping, and usability testing. She has taught design and
usability workshops at the Usability Professionals’ Association annual conference, the CHI
annual conference, the User Interface Engineering conferences, and at customer sites.
Ellen has a BS in Management Information Systems from Carroll College.

A Common Sense Approach for Discovering User Needs Author Biographies
Eric Bond
Eric Bond is a software designer at Metavante Corporation,

a provider of banking and payments technologies. Eric’s
primary work is interaction design and information design for
online banking applications. He brings a designer’s pragmatic
perspective to customer research.
Before joining Metavante, Eric worked as a technical writer,

editor, and designer of online support tools at Oracle, Apple Computer, and Taligent. Eric
has taught at the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design and at conferences for User Interface
Engineering and the Usability Professionals’ Association.
Eric has an interdisciplinary MA in Professional Writing from Carnegie Mellon University.

The UIE Fundamentals Series is published by
User Interface Engineering
510 Turnpike Street, Suite 102
North Andover, MA 01845
(978) 327-5561
(800) 588-9855 (within the U.S. and Canada)
www.uie.com
Company Background
User Interface Engineering is a leading research, training, and consulting firm specializing in
web site and product usability. Jared M. Spool founded the company back in 1988 and has
built User Interface Engineering into the largest research organization of its kind in the world.
With our in-depth research findings based on user observation, we empower development
teams to create usable web sites that increase customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Publications
UIE Reports: Our in-depth reports detail the latest happenings in the world of design
UIE Brain Sparks Blog: UIE’s place to share our latest research and musings with you. We’ll
be sharing our latest ideas and observations in the hope of sparking the same in you.
Brain Sparks Audio Library: Audio recordings of the latest thinking in design, including
the new SpoolCast recordings: intruiging sessions with today’s top thinkers about user
experience.
UIEtips Email Newsletter: Our free e-mail newsletter highlighting our latest research,
products, and public speaking engagements.
Training Events
User Interface 12 Conference—Cambridge, MA—November 5 – 8, 2007
Take your organization’s web design and usability practices to the next level. At User
Interface 12, we’ve invited the most knowledgeable experts that we know will offer practical
design tips. You’ll spend 4 days learning advanced techniques from top design, information
architecture, and usability experts.
UIE Virtual Seminars

Here is your opportunity to learn the design, information architecture, and usability insights
used by today’s most successful web sites. UIE’s monthly Virtual Seminars will give you the
chance to hear the latest perspectives in the world of design from the field’s premier
experts.
Instead of traveling to a training course, you and your colleagues can hear the latest insights
on the most important design topics right from your office.
Learn more at http://www.uie.com.

Six Circles - An Experience Design Framework

Încărcat de

Informații document

Drepturi de autor

Formate disponibile

Partajați acest document

Partajați sau inserați document

Opțiuni de partajare

Vi se pare util acest document?

Este necorespunzător acest conținut?

Drepturi de autor:

Formate disponibile

Six Circles - An Experience Design Framework

Încărcat de

Drepturi de autor:

Formate disponibile

UIE Reports Fundamentals Series

the field study handbook:

UIE Fundamentals Reports

The Field Study Handbook:

Written By: Kate Gomoll

Published By: User Interface Engineering

Cover Design: Laura Spindler

Copyright © 2007, User Interface Engineering. All rights reserved.

i i www.uie.com ©2007 User Interface Engineering. Reproduction Prohibited

Chapter 1: Field Studies Overview

Chapter 2: Planning Your Field Study

Chapter 3: The Site Visit

Chapter 4: Analyzing the Data

©2007 User Interface Engineering. Reproduction Prohibited www.uie.com ii

A process for small projects....................................................................................................................... 50

About the Authors

iii iii www.uie.com ©2007 User Interface Engineering. Reproduction Prohibited

The Field Study Handbook:

We are pleased to provide you with electronic

The Field Study Handbook Samples:

• Screener for qualifying participants

©2007 User Interface Engineering. Reproduction Prohibited iv

Field Studies Overview

Where field research fits

• Test – Evaluate the model through usability reviews and testing.

Why field research is important

In later stages of the user-centered design process—especially usability testing—the focus

 www.uie.com ©2007 User Interface Engineering. Reproduction Prohibited

The field study process

Below is the overall process for conducting field studies.

• Conduct observations and interviews

• Organize the data

Threaded throughout this process is a philosophy of pragmatism:

©2007 User Interface Engineering. Reproduction Prohibited www.uie.com 

Our Philosophy in Action

 www.uie.com ©2007 User Interface Engineering. Reproduction Prohibited

Selecting the right project

• Management wants the product. It’s beneficial if your management is behind a

 www.uie.com ©2007 User Interface Engineering. Reproduction Prohibited

• There is little organizational resistance. If you have a choice, consider working

• People are becoming discretionary users. Because the competition is so fierce,

©2007 User Interface Engineering. Reproduction Prohibited www.uie.com 

Training Time Significantly Reduced

• Field research results

Changing the scheduling process

 www.uie.com ©2007 User Interface Engineering. Reproduction Prohibited

Building multidisciplinary design teams

©2007 User Interface Engineering. Reproduction Prohibited www.uie.com 

• Show prototypes as soon as you can—but present the research first. As

Develop the Study Plan

1. Assembling your team

Assembling your team

 www.uie.com ©2007 User Interface Engineering. Reproduction Prohibited

• Software engineers or web site developers – The software engineers and

• Technical writer – Consider including a technical writer on your research and

How many people should be on the team?

©2007 User Interface Engineering. Reproduction Prohibited www.uie.com 10

How many people should attend each site visit?

Team member roles

11 www.uie.com ©2007 User Interface Engineering. Reproduction Prohibited

Understanding the domain

©2007 User Interface Engineering. Reproduction Prohibited www.uie.com 12

• What is the competition doing? For example, is your competition already

• Technical support centers – If your product, or an earlier version of the product,

www.uie.com ©2007 User Interface Engineering. Reproduction Prohibited

©2007 User Interface Engineering. Reproduction Prohibited www.uie.com

www.uie.com ©2007 User Interface Engineering. Reproduction Prohibited

www.uie.com ©2007 User Interface Engineering. Reproduction Prohibited

©2007 User Interface Engineering. Reproduction Prohibited www.uie.com

www.uie.com ©2007 User Interface Engineering. Reproduction Prohibited

©2007 User Interface Engineering. Reproduction Prohibited www.uie.com

www.uie.com ©2007 User Interface Engineering. Reproduction Prohibited