Contextual Inquiry is a method developed by Karen Holzblatt and Hugh Beyer. Unfortunately, I see no relationship to their great stuff; no evidence that the authors have looked there for guidance. I wonder just how Karen – because she teaches workshops on the method – feels about the idea of remote contextual inquiry. I always thought the point of contextual inquiry was the *context* part. How do you get that if you’re remote?

What you’re describing here is remote usability testing, which a lot of people are doing, and that Nate Bolt and Tony Tulathimutte have written an excellent book on.

Good luck,
Dana
dana@usabilityworks.net

As you stated, remote contextual inquiry is a real valuable tool. With usability budgets getting cut and not so great economy, everybody should really think about using remote testing or conferencing softwares as part of their arsenals.

In my current and past positions designing enterprise business software, we used remote usability testing/CI to supplement our UI design and user research.
Key word here is supplement: It should be used in conjunction with traditional CI (Contextual Inquiry) methods – meaning, actually visiting customers at their work. This is especially important for new designers or researchers with limited real world experience.
Also in enterprise software world, especially in supply chain/CRM/Portal/etc., there are multiple types of users with different levels of experience. As your article stated, it’s important to really identify who your target users will be…. Business Analysts can help you identify the users – but not always. I often find myself helping my customers really identify their workflow – both in government and private industries. In past, through series of interviews and site visits, my team started to see some workflow patterns that even business analysts (customer side) or my company’s product managers couldn’t really figure out. Identifying product usage through workflow can be pretty valuable in enterprise softwares. So do this first – well at least some of it. After awhile, you can see some base patterns that can be categorized by customer’s vertical industry, size, culture, deployment, etc.

Remote usability testing/CI again is a really useful tool. But in the end, just my personal opinion, it will only help you identify some GUI level problems – e.g. labeling, basic interaction,etc. Changing one area of the UI can lead to problems for other users (for programmers, similar analogy is fixing one bug sometimes leads to addional bugs…). Unlike consumer softwares, it’s very hard to figure correct workflow and design intuitive UI for each customer in enterprise softwares. Then again, these customers are paying lot of money for your enterprise software. My recommendation to decisions makers: hire some good UI people in your professional services team.

Some simple recommendations for conducting remote CI:
1. This is basic, but often left out. Print out time zone for different parts of the world, or have access to time zone converter application.
2. If you are using webEX or similar software/services, try following setup: computer that you will use to connect with your user remotely, and have another computer connected also to conferencing session. But have the other computer record the session. This is more reliable method – since recording screen sessions can be CPU intensive (might crash your computer).
3. From my personal experience, having session over hour can be tiring for the users. Unless your users has a webcam, it’s hard to tell if your user is getting tired…..you tend to get fuzzy responses then your users get tired
4.I don’t work for camtasia, but recording the session over camtasia like software over webconferecing software is recommended. I don’t recommend using NetMeeting for various reasons – I just found it easier to get people to use webex or placeware.
5. Email some pre-interview questions in advance. I also usually add a link in the email to get users to test if their computer will work with remote conferencing software.
6. Expect about 10 -15 minute delay when you start the remote CI session – often it will take users 10-15 minutes to get their computers configured to use web conferencing services…….

Of course get permission to record the session and etc..

Ji