Are You Sure? Really? A Contextual Approach to Agile User Research

The creation of excellent user experiences often appears to be a forgotten goal in the software development world. This paper discusses the use of a concrete method, contextual inquiry, which leads to insights that will help development teams create experiences and interfaces that match user needs and expectations. This method encourages agile team members to see the world from the users' perspective by working directly in the users' context. Contextual inquiry is a valuable tool for collecting and analyzing user data, superior to relying on general feedback from user self-reports and questionnaires. Our paper starts with a historical view of the problem, then covers how we planned and executed our contextual inquiry study, and concludes with lessons learned from our experiences.