User research in the field is an effective way to learn about users and their context. It typically takes place where users live, play, or work. The following lessons learned from our own studies can help you avoid common problems. Whether you are doing qualitative usability testing or user interviews with participants who are employees of a corporation or you are conducting direct observation in someone’s home, here are some universal tips and tricks that can help you in that process.

In This Article:

Before the Study

  1. Determine when you need to deliver results. This information will determine your method, scheduling, budget, and prioritization of questions you need to answer.
  2. Do a pilot study to debug your materials and understand how much you might get done during the allotted time. Likely, you will have too many questions or tasks and not enough time.
  3. Prioritize and make some of the last questions and tasks optional. You can also plan how to best rotate questions among participants so you get good coverage of your research issues.
  4. Consider making an editable script for each session so that you can take notes and add them directly into the script. You can take notes on a tablet or a laptop. Use a checklist for important things to take with you.
  5. Your questions could evolve or change over the sessions as you learn. Prepare stakeholders and observers for this process and explain why, unlike other types of research, such as surveys, it is okay to adapt the script.
  6. Monitor recruiting closely to make sure you are not getting professional research volunteers, superusers, trainers, administrators, or support specialists when you need to see the actual users. Do not let well-meaning helpers stack the deck with “good” but unrepresentative participants in a misguided attempt to ensure that people perform well in the study.
  7. Recruit diverse participants in terms of ethnicity, role, gender, and experience with the task domain and the system. If you are working with software or device interfaces, it is a good idea to include at least one person whose native language is not the language of the interface.
  8. Weigh locations carefully. Think about whether you need to conduct research sessions in each person’s normal work or living space or to move them to another venue, such as a conference room — for example, to get enough privacy and a quiet space. Sometimes a noisy environment is essential to recreate all the distractions people will typically have to deal with when using the system. However, be mindful of other people (family members, neighbors, colleagues) in that natural environment and how their presence might influence the participant’s responses.
  9. When conducting research at a business location, reserve a conference room or another private area for the researchers and observers to use when not in sessions. A whiteboard and a projector might come in handy too. Make snacks and drinks available. Ensure that research participants can’t overhear the team talking. While visiting a private residence, never go alone, and listen to your gut feeling in terms of personal safety. 
  10. If your study takes place in a workplace such as a company’s physical offices, the onsite project manager may be able to arrange incentives and small tokens of appreciation for your hosts, or local collaborators. This help can be extremely useful when your research takes place in a different culture or country than your own, as you will need to account for the cultural norms and local business etiquette.

Study Observers

  1. Encourage and welcome observers, especially if they are qualitative-research skeptics. Stakeholders who observe such field studies can become your biggest advocates for change, and it saves a lot of explaining time to have them onsite. Having a few extra people can also be advantageous when problems crop up, and you need others to work in parallel with you, run errands, or intervene when political or emotional issues intrude. However, limit the number of observers per session. Do not overwhelm your participants by crowding them out of their cubicles or living spaces. If needed, schedule the observers too. The more - the better, but make sure you are running the show, so the observers will not prevent you from getting the data you need. 
  2. Since observers might want to talk to the participants, provide guidelines about how other people can ask questions. You will often need to reword some questions before they get asked to remove biases. Be ready to alert observers who cause problems through a prearranged signaling system. For example, passing notes or exchanging text or Slack messages works well for communicating with observers during sessions. 
  3. Reserve 5 minutes at the end of the session for observer questions so that they do not derail your research. Sometimes a quiet discussion after a session is necessary to regain cooperation. If power struggles appear during the planning phase, build in extra participant-question time for the stakeholders at the end of each session and extra debriefing time.
  4. Debrief observers and any onsite research team after each session. Bring attention to interesting observations that otherwise get lost or forgotten.

During the Study

  1.  Make sketches. Consider sketching notes and ideas on copies of the user interface screens and taking photos of the surrounding context.
  2. Keep copies of the original images and documents, so you can have as many of them as you want to annotate.
  3. Date documents for version control. You will thank yourself later for this.
  4. Number participants and their documents so you won’t be attaching participants’ real names to the data.
  5. Take good notes, even if you are allowed to make recordings. Recordings take just as long to listen to as the original session, and recordings sometimes fail. Capturing observations and insights in real-time can be crucial.
  6. Don’t rely on people to remember to send you promised material after the session. Get permission for someone to email them one reminder if needed.
  7. Pay attention to everything in the environment. Look for context CUEs, which are implicit assumptions and habits, things that stand out in the observed culture, and details about the space where the activities take place.
  8. Don’t rely on your memory for anything. Note your questions, ideas, insights, to-do items, and concerns as they arise.
  9. Make debriefing notes so they can become the source for preliminary top findings.

After the Study

  1. If you pay the incentive in cash at the time of the research session, the consent form could serve as your signed receipt. Nowadays, it is more common to send an electronic gift card via email or hand a physical card to the participant either at the beginning or the end of the session.
  2. If you have recordings that need to be shared with stakeholders, add data-confidentiality instructions and warnings at the beginning of each video or audio file. Release recordings only to a responsible person who fully understands the need to keep research-participant data safe and anonymous and destroy raw data and personally identifiable information as soon as it’s no longer needed. Ideally, there should be a scheduled deletion date after which recordings are no longer accessible and automatically deleted from the repository. 
  3. Compile and share preliminary top findings as soon as possible while everything is still fresh in your mind.
  4. Thank everyone who helped make the research effort successful. In a corporate environment, if allowed, bring a business gift for the host(s), such as a UX book or an office-supply item, or make plans to go out for a meal together. 

Conclusion

When preparing for field-research projects, collaborate with stakeholders to make a research plan, ensure you take the equipment and supplies you need, review these tips, and then relax and have a great field study.

Learn more about ethnographic research in our course Ethnographic UX Research: Diary Studies and Contextual Inquiry.