Successful User Experience: Strategies and Roadmaps

Chapter 9

Moving Past the Lab

Abstract

This chapter is about field studies and focus group, methods outside the formal setting of a lab. One case study describes a field study at a hospital and one describes a focus group done for the Medicare.gov project.

Keywords

Field studies

Focus groups

Interviews

The environment is everything that isn’t me.

Albert Einstein

Field Studies/Contextual Inquiry

Visiting a person at their office and observing how they work and what the environment looks like can tell us so much more than simply talking to a person in a lab or over the telephone. These site visits allow us to see the context in which people are using things. Even a single visit can provide a large amount of information to help improve a product ...