The Contextual Inquiry Process

Since you'll be going out of your office and into the workplaces and homes of your customers, it's especially important to be thoroughly prepared. You won't have the option to go back and get something you've forgotten, and you'll be the one making the first impression about your company (not the cool new leather waiting room furniture).

Target Audience

Choosing an appropriate target audience is described in detail in Chapter 6 of this book, but the short version is that you should pick people like the people you think will want to use your product. Maybe they use the product already. Maybe they use a competitor's product. Regardless, they should have the same profile as the target audience that will eventually use what you have to offer.

You should specify this target audience in as much detail as you can, concentrating on their behavior.

• What is their demographic makeup ?

• What is their Web use profile?

• What tasks do they regularly do?

• What tools do they regularly use?

• Are there tools they must occasionally use to solve specific problems?

• How do they use them?

Concentrate on the most important customers. Your product may appeal to a varied group of people, but there are only going to be a couple of key target markets. In fact, there may be only one. Focus all of your research there until you feel that you know what there is to know about their behavior, and then move on to secondary markets.

Recruiting

Once you have your profile, you need to find people that match it. A complete description of recruiting is in Chapter 6, but here are some things to consider when recruiting for contextual inquiry.

First, decide how many people you want to visit. The number will depend on how much time you have allocated to the research and the resources available. Beyer and Holtzblatt suggest observing 15 to 20 people, but that can be prohibitive because of the amount of interview and analysis time it requires. Five to eight people should give you a pretty good idea of how a big chunk of the target audience does their work (or entertains themselves , or shops , or whatever the focus of your product happens to be) and should be enough for a first round of inquiry. If you find that you have not met the goals of the research or you don't feel comfortable with the results at the end of the first round, schedule a second round.

Scheduling

Once you've found your group of candidates, you need to schedule them. Contextual inquiry sessions can last from a couple of hours to a full workday , depending on the length of the tasks and how much ancillary information you'll be collecting. The most important criterion in scheduling is that the people need to be doing the kinds of activity you're going to study while you're observing them. It may be necessary to negotiate with them so you show up when they're planning to do the relevant tasks or to ask them to wait until you arrive.

Interviews can last from an hour to three or four. Schedule one or two interviews per day, along with some time to review your observations. If you have multiple observers, you can schedule several interviews at once (this makes some logistics easier, but requires extra equipment).

Since the research is going to be onsite, give the participants some idea of what to expect. Tell them the general goals of the research, how long it will take, what equipment is going to be used, and what kinds of things you're going to be looking at. You don't have to be specific (and, in fact, leaving some specifics out can produce a more spontaneous response), but they should have a good idea of what's involved before you show up. Tell them not to prepare for your arrival at all, that it's important that you see how they work, warts and all.

When studying people in office environments, it's often necessary to get releases and to sign nondisclosure agreements. Sometimes it's possible to do stealth research under the promise of anonymity, but video equipment is pretty visible, and it's hard to ignore a stranger hanging out all morning watching a certain cube and taking notes. If there's any doubt, ask the people you've scheduled to tell everyone who needs to know about your arrival and to get you all the forms you need to have as early as possible.

The incentive payment should reflect the length of the observation and should be between $100 and $200 for most research. However, companies may have policies restricting such payments to their employees , which should be determined ahead of time (this is especially true when the company being studied is the same company commissioning the research—as is often the case for intranet or in-house software projects). If cash payment is not allowed, then a small gift may be appropriate (though not for government agencies or regulated industries). Follow-up interviews should be treated likewise unless you agree with the participants ahead of time on a single lump sum (in which case, it should reflect the total amount of time spent).

Learn the Domain

In order to be able to understand what people are doing and to properly analyze your data, you need to be familiar with what they do. This means familiarizing yourself with the terminology, the tools, and the techniques that they are likely to be using in their work. You don't have to know all the details of their job, but you should be somewhat familiar with the domain.

If you know nothing about a task, before you begin your research, you can have someone familiar with it walk you through a session. If you have the time, you can also use the "sportscaster method," having one expert explain what another one is doing, as in a play-by-play commentary . They don't have to go into complicated technical explanations , just enough to familiarize you with the job.

If possible, try the task yourself. If it's something that is done with software, ask to borrow a copy (or a training manual) and use it for a couple of hours. If it's something that's done physically and you can try it without risk, ask to try it (this works for things like making pizza and data entry, but it's not as successful for things like nuclear chemistry ). If the environment you're studying is a technical one, ask a member of technical support or quality assurance to walk you through some typical tasks to see how they, as expert in-house users, do them.

In general, the more you know about the tasks your target audience does, the better you'll be able to interpret their behavior when you observe it.

Develop Scenarios

As part of your preparation, you should be explicit about your expectations. Attempt to write down how and when you expect the people you're observing to do certain things that are important to your product, and what attitudes you expect they will have toward certain elements. You can do this with other members of the development team, asking them to profile the specific actions you expect people to take in the same way that you profiled your audience's general behavior in Chapter 7. This will give you a platform against which you can compare their observed behavior.

When you're in the interview, keep these scenarios in mind while watching people. Keep an open mind about what you're seeing, and use the situations where observed behavior doesn't match your expectations as triggers for deeper investigation.

Practical Stuff

In addition to all the contextual inquiry-related preparation, there are a number of things you should do just because you're leaving the comfort of your office:

• Make a list of everything you're going to bring—every pencil, videotape, and notebook. Start the list a week before you're going to do your first interview. Then, whenever you realize there's something else you should bring, add it to the list. A day before the interview, make sure you have everything on the list (I put a check next to every item I have) and get everything you don't. On interview day, cross off everything as it's loaded into your backpack or car.

• If you're going to get releases (either to allow you to observe or for the participants to participate), make sure you have twice as many as you expect to need.

• Bring everything you need for the incentive payment. This could be a disbursement form from accounting, a check, or an envelope with cash. Blank receipt forms are useful, too (though some accounting departments will accept a participant release as proof of receipt of payment).

• Know how to operate your equipment. Set up a test site that will simulate the user 's work environment ahead of time. A day or two before, set up everything as you're going to use it onsite, complete with all cords plugged in, all tripods extended, all cameras running, and all laptops booted . Then break it down and set it back up again. Get a set of good head-phones to check the quality of the audio. Good audio quality is the most important part of the video-recording process.

• Have more than enough supplies . Bring an extension cord, two extra videotapes, two extra pads of paper, and a couple of extra pens. You never know when a tape will jam or an interview ends up being so exciting that you go through two notepads. If you plan on using a laptop to take notes, make sure that you bring either extra batteries or an AC adapter (one will suffice).

• Make plans for meal breaks. Closely watching someone for several hours can be draining, and you don't want to run around an office frantically looking for a drinking fountain while worried that you're missing a key moment. Bring bottled water and plan to eat in between sessions, or have lunch with your participants, which can be a good opportunity to get background on their jobs in a less formal setting.

Conducting the Inquiry

One of the keys to getting good feedback in a contextual inquiry situation is establishing rapport with the participant. Since you want to watch him or her working as "naturally" as possible, it's important to set out expectations about each other's roles. Beyer and Holtzblatt define several kinds of relationships you can strive for.

• The master/apprentice model introduces you as the apprentice and the person who you'll be watching as the master. You learn his or her craft by watching. Occasionally, the apprentice can ask a question or the master can explain a key point, but the master's primary role is to do his or her job, narrating what he or she is doing while doing it (without having to think about it or explain why). This keeps the "master craftsman" focused on details, avoiding the generalizations that may gloss over key details that are crucial to a successful design.

• Partnership is an extension of the master/apprentice model where the interviewer partners with the participant in trying to extract the details of his or her work. The participant is made aware of the elements of his or her work that are normally invisible, and the partner discusses the fundamental assumptions behind the work, trying to bring problems and ways of working to the surface. The participant is occasionally invited to step back and comment about a certain action or statement and think about the reasons for his or her behavior. Although this can potentially alter the participant's behavior, it can also provide critical information at key points.

Beyer and Holtzblatt also point out several relationships to avoid.

• The interviewer/interviewee. Normally, an interviewee is prompted by an interviewer's questions into revealing information. Interviewees won't reveal details unless specifically asked. That's not the situation you want in a contextual inquiry situation. You want the participant's work and thoughts to drive the interview. When you find yourself acting as a journalist , prompting the participant before he or she says something, refocus the interview on the work.

• The expert/novice. Although you may be the expert in creating software for helping them, the participants are experts in their own domain. As Beyer and Holtzblatt suggest, "Set the customer's expectation correctly at the beginning by explaining that you are there to hear about and see their work because only they know their work practice. You aren't there to help them with problems or answer questions." They suggest that it should be clear that the goal is not to solve the problems then and there, but to know what the problems are and how they solve them on their own. If you are asked to behave as an expert, use nondirected interviewing techniques and turn the question around, "How would you expect it to print?"

• Don't be a guest. Your comfort should not be the focus of attention. You are there to understand how they do their work, not to bask in the light of their hospitality. Be sensitive to the protocol of the situation. If good manners dictate acting as a guest for the first few minutes of your visit, then do so to make the participants comfortable, but quickly encourage them to get on with their work and move into a more partnership-based dialogue.

• Another role to avoid is big brother. You are not there to evaluate or critique the performance of the people you are observing, and that should be clear. If they feel that way, then they're not likely to behave in typical ways. Moreover, if participation in your research is at the request of their managers, it can seem that this is a sneaky way to check up on them. Emphasize that you are not in a position to evaluate their performance. If possible, once you've gotten permission from management to do so, contact and schedule people yourself rather than having it come as a demand from above.

Inquiry Structure

The structure of the inquiry is similar to the structure of most interviews, except that the majority of it is driven by the interviewee's work rather than the interviewer's questions. The structure follows the general interview structure described in Chapter 6: introduction, warm-up, general issues, deep focus, retrospective, wrap-up .

The introduction and warm-up should be times for the participant and the interviewer to get comfortable with each other and to set up expectations for how the observation will proceed. This is the time to get all the nondisclosure forms signed, describe the project in broad detail, and set up the equipment. Check that the image and sound recording is good, and then don't fuss with the equipment again until the interview is over since it'll just distract people from their work. Describe the master/apprentice model and emphasize your role as an observer and learner. Remind the participant to narrate what he or she is doing and not to go for deep explanations.

Once you're in position, you may want to ask some general questions to gain an understanding of who the person is, what his or her job is, and what tasks he or she is going to be doing. Ask the participant to provide a description of a typical day: what kinds of things does he or she do regularly? What are occasional tasks? Where does today's task fit into a typical day? Don't delve too deeply into the reasons for what he or she does; concentrate on actions and the sequence.

This will begin the main observation period. This phase should comprise at least two- thirds of the interview. Most of the time should be spent observing what the participants are doing, what tools they are using, and how they are using them. Begin by asking them to give a running description of what they're doing, as to an apprentice—just enough to tell the apprentice what's going on, but not enough to interrupt the flow of the work—and then tell them to start working. As an apprentice, you may occasionally ask for explanations, clarifications, or walk-throughs of actions, but don't let it drive the discussion. I find that taking occasional notes while spending most of my energy concentrating on their words and actions works well, but it requires me to watch the videotape to get juicy quotations and capture the subtlety of the interaction. Others recommend taking lots of notes onsite and using the videotape as backup. Regardless, you should have a clear method to highlight follow-up questions. I write them in a separate place from the rest of my notes.

When either the task is done or time is up, the main interview period is over. An immediate follow-up interview with in-depth questions can clarify a lot. Certain situations may not have been appropriate to interrupt (if you're observing a surgeon or a stock trader , that may apply to the whole observation period), whereas others may have brought up questions that would have interrupted the task flow. As much as possible, ask these while the participant's memory is still fresh. To jog people's memories, you can even rewind the videotape and show them the sequence you'd like them to describe in the viewfinder (but only do this if you can find it quickly since your time is better spent asking questions than playing with the camera). To quote Victoria Bellotti, senior scientist at Xerox PARC, "You'll never understand what's really going on until you've talked to people about what they are doing. The [follow-up] interview . . . gives you the rationale to make sense of things that might otherwise seem odd or insignificant." If there are too many questions for the time allotted, or if they're too involved, schedule another meeting to clarify them (and schedule it quickly, generally within one or two days of the initial interview since people's memories fade quickly).

Wrap-up the interview by asking the participant about the contextual inquiry experience from his or her perspective. Was there anything about it that made him or her anxious? Is there anything the participant would like to do differently? Are there things that you, as the apprentice, could do differently?

Beyer and Holtzblatt summarize the spirit of the interviewing process as follows:

Running a good interview is less about following specific rules than it is about being a certain kind of person for the duration of the interview. The apprentice model is a good starting point for how to behave. The four principles of Contextual Inquiry modify the behavior to better get design data: context, go where the work is and watch it happen; partnership, talk about the work while it happens; interpretation, find the meaning behind the customer's words and actions; and focus, challenge your entering assumptions.

So what you want most is to come in unbiased and, with open eyes and ears, learn as much as you can about how the work is done while trying to find out why it is so.

What to Collect

There are four kinds of information you should pay attention to when observing people at work. Each of these elements can be improvised or formal, shared or used alone, specific or flexible.

• The tools they use. This can be a formal tool, such as a specialized piece of software, or it can be an informal tool, such as a scribbled note. Note whether the tools are being used as they're designed, or if they're being repurposed. How do the tools interact? What are the brands? Are the Post-its on the bezel of the monitor or on the outside flap of the Palm Pilot?

• The sequences in which actions occur. The order of actions is important in terms of understanding how the participant is thinking about the task. Is there a set order that's dictated by the tools or by office culture? When does the order matter? Are there things that are done in parallel? Is it done continuously, or simultaneously with another task? How do interruptions affect the sequence?

• Their methods of organization. People cluster some information for convenience and some out of necessity. The clustering may be shared between people, or it may be unique to the individual being observed. How does the target audience organize the information elements they use? By importance? If so, how is importance defined? By convenience? Is the order flexible?

• What kinds of interactions they have. What are the important parties in the transfer of knowledge? Are they people? Are they processes? What kinds of information are shared (what are the inputs and outputs)? What is the nature of the interaction (informational, technical, social, etc.)?

The influences of all four of these things will, of course, be intertwined, and sometimes it may be hard to unravel the threads. The participant may be choosing a sequence for working on data, or the organization of the data may force a certain sequence. Note the situations where behaviors may involve many constraints. These are the situations you can clarify with a carefully placed question or during the follow-up interview.

Artifacts are—for the purposes of contextual inquiry—the nondigital tools people use to help them accomplish the tasks they're trying to do. Documenting and collecting people's artifacts can be extremely enlightening. For example, if you're interested in how people schedule, it may be appropriate to photograph their calendars to see what kinds of annotations they make, or to videotape them using the office whiteboard that serves as the group calendar. If you're interested in how they shop for food, you may want to collect their shopping lists and videotape them at the supermarket picking out items. It's doubtful that you'd want to collect a surgeon's instruments after an operation, but you may want a record of how they're arranged. Having a digital camera with a large storage capacity can really help artifact collection and digital pictures of artifacts, and how people use them can make great illustrations in reports and presentations.

Always make sure to get permission when you copy or collect artifacts.

Here is a snippet of the notes from an observation of a health insurance broker using an existing online system to create an RFP (request for proposal):

Looks at paper [needs summary] form for coverage desired. Circles coverage section with pen.

Goes to Plan Search screen.

Opens "New Search" window.

"I know I want a 90/70 with a 5/10 drug, but I'm going to get all of the 90/70 plans no matter what."

Types in plan details without looking back at form.

Looks at search results page.

Points at top plan: "Aetna has a 90/70 that covers chiro, so I'm looking at their plan as a benchmark, which is enough to give me an idea of what to expect from the RFP."

Clicks on Aetna plan for full details.

Prints out plan details on printer in hall (about three cubes away) using browser Print button. Retrieves printout and places it on top of needs summary form.

Would like to get details on similar recent quotes.

Goes back to search results. Scrolls through results and clicks on Blue Shield plan.

I recommend videotaping every contextual inquiry (in fact, every interview you have, period) since it provides an inexpensive record that allows for more nuanced analysis than any other method. Some key events happen only once. Notes take the interviewer/moderator/observer's attention away from the participants and may not be able to capture all the details that make the event important. Two-person teams can be intimidating, and require two skilled people to be present for all interviews. Audio recording doesn't record body language or facial expressions, which can add vital information to what people really think and feel. Only video can approach the full experience of being there. At worst, it's no worse than audio; at best, it's much better.

However, recording good interviews on video takes some practice, especially when working in the field. The twin dragons that can keep you from a good recording are insufficient light and noisy sound .

• Light . Most video cameras aren't as sensitive as human eyes, so a room that looks perfectly fine to the human eye can be too dark for a run-of-the-mill video camera. When there's not enough light, you don't capture the details of the environment. Fortunately, recent generations of consumer cameras have enough low-light sensitivity to be useful in all but the dimmest environments. If you anticipate having to tape in a dark environment, try to find a camera that can work in 2 lux or less. This will give you enough sensitivity that even things in partial shadow can be videotaped. Be aware of different light levels and the way your camera compensates for them. A bright computer monitor in a dim room can cause the camera to make the rest of the image too dark. A picture window onto a sunny day can cause everything inside a room to appear in shadow. Many cameras can compensate for these situations but need to be set appropriately.

• Sound . The hum of a computer fan. The hiss of an air conditioner. Laughing from the cafeteria next door. It's amazing what ends up recorded instead of what you wanted. Good sound is probably the most technically important part of the whole recording process. Getting it can be tricky. Most video cameras have omnidirectional microphones that pick up a broad arc of sound in front (and sometimes behind) the camera. This is great for taping the family at Disney World, but not so great when you're trying to isolate a participant's voice from the background noise. Get a camera with a good built-in microphone, an external microphone jack, and a headphone jack. Get a decent set of headphones, plug them into the headphone jack, and walk around with the camera, listening to how it picks up sound. Then, when you're onsite, adjust the camera with the headphones to minimize how much external noise it picks up. You may have to do this at the cost of getting a good image, or you may have to get an external directional microphone and mount it separately. If worse comes to worst, you can use an external lapel microphone on a long cord. Keep the headphones attached to the camera throughout the interview and discreetly check the audio quality every once in a while.

Even the best equipment is sometimes insufficient or superfluous. Some situations are impossible or awkward to videotape. In others, you can't get permission. In those cases, audio recordings can often be used, but they carry only part of the information and tend to be more labor intensive to analyze. Use audio recording when you can, but be prepared to fall back on paper and pen.

How to Analyze Contextual Inquiry Data

The output from Contextual Inquiry is not a neat hierarchy; rather, it is narratives of successes and breakdowns, examples of use that entail context, and messy use artifacts.

—Dave Hendry, Assistant Professor, University of Washington Information School, personal email

How data should be interpreted should differ based on the task under examination. Contextual inquiry helps you understand how people solve problems, how they create meaning, and what their unfulfilled needs are. It does this largely through six methods.

• Understanding the mental models people build. People don't like black boxes. They don't like the unknown. They want to understand how something works in order to be able to predict what it will do. When the operation of a process or tool isn't apparent, people create their own model for it. This model helps them explain the results they see and frames their expectations of how it will behave in the future. This model may have nothing to do with the actual functionality of the tool, but if it matches their experience, then it's the one they're going to use. Knowing the model being used allows you to capitalize on that understanding and meet people's expectations.

• Understanding the tools they use. Since you're building a tool that's supposed to replace the tools people use now, it's important to know what those tools are and how they're used. Rather than leisurely browsing a catalog as you would expect them to do, they may just check the specials page and let an online comparison engine find the cheapest price. They may keep addresses in a Palm Pilot, a carefully organized address book, or they may just have a pocketful of scribbled-on scraps of paper. Maybe your competition isn't Outlook or the Daytimer, but napkins!

• Understanding the terminology they use to describe what they do. Words reveal a lot about people's models and thought processes. When shopping for food, people may talk in terms of meals, calories , or food groups. They may use one ("bread") to represent another ("carbohydrates") or misuse technical terminology (using "drivetrain" to talk about a car's suspension, for example). Paying attention to the words people use and the way they use them can reveal a lot about their thought patterns.

• Understanding their methods. The flow of work is important to understanding what people's needs are and where existing tools are failing them. Unraveling the approach people take to solving a task reveals a lot about the strengths and weaknesses of the tools they use. If someone composes a message in a word processor and then cuts and pastes it into an email program, that says something about how he or she perceives the strengths of each product. If he or she is scribbling URLs on a pad while looking through a search engine, it says something about the weaknesses of the search engine and the browser and something about the strength of paper.

• Understanding their goals. Every action has a reason. Understanding why people perform certain actions reveals an underlying structure to their work that they may not be aware of themselves. Although a goal may seem straightforward ("I need to find and print a TV listing for tonight"), the reasons behind it may reveal a lot about the system people are using ("I want to watch The Simpsons at eastern time so that I can go bowling when it's on normally, but I don't know which satellite it's going to be on and there's no way to search the on-screen guide like you can search the Web site").

• Understanding their values. People's value systems are part of their mental model. We're often driven by our social and cultural contexts as much as by our rational decisions. What is the context for the use of these tools? Are they chosen solely because of their functionality, or do other factors apply? Is the brand important? (If so, why? What qualities do they associate with it? Are they aware of other brands that do the same thing?) Do they work in the context of others who use the same tools? If so, why does the group do things the way it does?

There are several ways to do a full analysis of the data you collect. Beyer and Holtzblatt recommend what they call the affinity diagram method (which is loosely patterned on the technique of the same name pioneered by Jiro Kawakita and known in the industrial quality management world as a KJ diagram ). This method creates a hierarchy of all the observations, clustering them into trends. A paraphrased version of their method is as follows (see Chapter 9 of Contextual Design for a complete description of their method):

1. Watch the observation videotapes to create 50–100 notes from each 2-hour interview (longer interviews will produce more notes, though probably not in proportion to the length of the interview). Notes are singular observations about tools, sequences, interactions, mental models—anything. Number the notes and identify the user whose behavior inspired it (they recommend using numbers rather than names : U1, U2, U3, etc.). Randomize them.

2. Get a group of people together in a room with a blank wall, a large window, or a big whiteboard. Beyer and Holtzblatt recommend 1 person per 100 notes. Preferably, these are members of the development team. By making the development team do the analysis, a group understanding of the customer's needs is formed , consensus is built, and everyone is up to speed at the same time. Have them block out the whole day for the work. The whole affinity analysis should be done in a single day.

3. Divide the group into pairs of analysts. Give each pair an equal number of notes (ideally, each pair should have 100–200 notes).

4. Write a note on a yellow Post-it (yes, yellow; Beyer and Holtzblatt are very specific about Post-it colors) and put it on the wall/window/board.

5. Tell the groups to put notes that relate to that note around it one at a time. It doesn't matter how the notes relate, just as long as the group feels they relate.

6. If no more notes relate to a given note cluster, put a blue note next to the group. Write a label on the blue note, summarizing and naming the cluster. They recommend avoiding technical terminology in the labels and using simple phrasing to state "the work issue that holds all the individual notes together."

7. Repeat the process with the other notes, labeling groups in blue as they occur.

8. Try to keep the number of yellow notes per blue group between two and four. One note cannot be a group, and often groups of more than four notes can be broken into smaller clusters. However, there's no upper bound on how many notes may be in a group if there's no obvious way to break it up.

9. As the groups accumulate, they recommend using pink notes to label groups of blue notes, and green notes to label groups of pink notes.

Eventually, you run out of yellow notes, and the group of analysts reaches a consensus about which notes belong in which group and how to label the blue, pink, and green notes (Figure 8.1). At that point, you have a hierarchical diagram that shows, to quote Beyer and Holtzblatt, "every issue in the work and everything about it the team has learned so far, all tied to real instances."

Figure 8.1: A portion of an affinity diagram.

The insurance broker observation might produce an affinity diagram with the following fragments :

RFPs are tools that collect most of the information

RFPs are flexible

RFPs are read by people. (note 35, U2)

"I don't normally compare plans. I just ask for exactly what I want." (note 20, U1)

Plan comparisons provide critical information

Query specificity is important (and largely absent)

"I know I want a 90/70 with a 5/10 drug, but I'm going to get all the 90/70 plans no matter what." (note 55, U2)

Some plans exclude certain industries (legal). No way to filter on that. (note 43, U3)

Carrier ratings are important to customers. (note 74, U3)

Query output requires a lot of filtering

"Most of my time is fishing for information." (note 26, U1)

In addition to the affinity diagram method, it's also possible to do a more traditional kind of analysis based on an expert reading of the data. The observers can all meet and discuss their observations and hypothesize about how those observations are linked and what they mean. Although not as rigorous , this process can cut through voluminous data (which the Post-it process often produces) and create workable models that adequately describe people's behavior and attitudes. It's also a process that can be done by a lone researcher if the development team is unavailable. However, the affinity diagram process is recommended, when possible, because of the benefits it provides in communicating people's needs to the development team and getting maximum use out of the collected data.

Building Models

In many situations, this will be enough to begin building models of where the unmet needs are and how solutions can be made to fit with people's existing work practices. Beyer and Holtzblatt define five models that can be extracted from the information in the affinity diagram: flow models, sequence models, artifact models, physical models, and cultural models.

• Flow models are representations of "the communication between people to get work done." They show what information, knowledge, and artifacts get passed among the members of the development team. Their elements can be formal or informal, written or verbal. They seek to capture the interaction, strategy, roles, and informal structures within the communication that happens in a product's life cycle.

• Sequence models represent "the steps by which work is done, the triggers that kick off a set of steps, and the intents that are being accomplished." They show the order that things are done, what causes ("triggers") certain steps, the purpose ("intent") of each step, and how they depend on each other. They are sufficiently detailed to allow the team to understand, step by step, how a task is accomplished.

• Artifact models represent how people use real-world tools to accomplish their goals. Starting with a simple photograph, drawing, or photocopy of the object, artifact models "extend the information on the artifact to show structure, strategy, and intent." They provide insight into the tools people use, how they use them, what problems they have, and most important, why they're necessary.

• Physical models represent the actual physical environment that users do their work in. They provide an understanding of the layout of the workspace, the artifacts in the workspace, what controls people have (and don't have) over their environment, and how they use their environments to get work done.

• Cultural models represent an understanding of the users' values and how they see themselves. It places the product in the context of the users' lives and the real-world environment in which they live. It includes both the formal organization of their experience—their other responsibilities, the competitive climate—and the informal—the emotions associated with the work, the work environment, the users' esthetic values and style, and so on.