A Case Study in Contextual
Inquiry for Biomedical Research
Date and time:
April 19, 2006 (Wednesday)
7:00-9:00 p.m. Program
Dinner: 6:00-7:00 p.m. at La Madeleine for those who would like to join us (directions below)
Location:
Bethesda-Chevy Chase Regional Services Center
4805 Edgemoor Lane
Bethesda, MD 20814
Description: We will go through a case study of contextual inquiry — Scott’s team at the National Institutes of Health conducted an extensive set of interviews with their users. This is the story of how they executed it and how they processed the results.
All of us in the usability community believe in user analysis — “know thy users for they are not you.” We’ve got religion, as it were, but what next? In 1998, JoAnn Hackos and Ginny Redish (User and Task Analysis for Interface Design) and Hugh Beyer and Karen Holtzblatt (Contextual Design: Defining Customer Oriented Systems) gave us an answer with their books on contextual inquiry — the practice of watching your users do their work. Not only did they say “Go to your user,” but they told us how to do it, what to observe and write down, and how to process the results.
Scott’s team at the National Center for Biotechnology Information was working on a ground-up redesign of the interface of their biotechnology databases.
All of these help doctors, librarians, and research biologists diagnose patients, map genomes, and unravel the chemical underpinnings of life. Our job was to analyze these different audiences and come up with a set of requirements that met their needs.
To determine their requirements, we sat at the desks of 15 users and asked them to show us their work. They showed us recent searches they’d done, what they were trying to do, and problems they were having. Then we reviewed usability test results, sampled e-mails from the service desk, and held a focus group. In the end, we had 1,226 discrete observations to process. We covered the walls of a conference room for two weeks with our affinity diagramming, produced workflows, and organized them into personas and scenarios. From these, we generated the requirements.
During the presentation, we will cover:
How we sold management on conducting the analysis.
How we planned the analysis.
How we executed the interviews, e-mail analysis, usability tape reviews, etc.
How we dealt with the results and produced the requirements.
What worked well and what we would do differently.
We will also spend some time on the results themselves. Medical librarians search differently from biologists, for example. We’ll go into their differing approaches and how we might design differently for each.
Speaker: Scott McDaniel grew up as an experimental psychologist, shifted to technical writing, and finally morphed into an Interaction Designer. He worked as a user interface design consultant for several years before joining the team at the National Center for Biotechnology Information (part of the National Library of Medicine) where he contributes to the design of PubMed and many other biotechnology databases. He has also done work for ADP, IRS, Library of Congress, Elsevier, and many others. He particularly likes search interfaces (both designing and analyzing them), and has published articles in Usability Interface and Boxes and Arrows.
Scott founded the DC Chapter of the Society for Technical Communication’s Usability SIG and later served as the DC UPA chapter’s Vice-President.
Registration:
Advance registration is recommended. You can register using our
online registration
form.
After you have registered, we encourage you to pay in advance by using our online PayPal form or mailing a check.
Cost:
$5 for members of UPA-DC Metro
$10 for non-members
Directions to the Program:
The Bethesda-Chevy Chase Regional Services Center is located at
4805 Edgemoor Lane, Bethesda, MD 20814. The Center is in the two-story
County office building on the plaza level of the Metropolitan complex,
above a County parking garage. View
the MapQuest Map
By Car:
The entrance to the parking garage is marked with a large blue Bethesda
Center parking sign. Parking is available in the garage - $.75 per
hour short-term (3 hours or less), $.50 per hour for over 3 hours.
If you are coming south on Old Georgetown Road (from the Beltway
use exit 36), turn right on Woodmont Avenue and the parking entrance
is almost immediately on your left (second driveway). If you are
coming south on Wisconsin Avenue/Rockville Pike, turn right onto
Woodmont Avenue, go south for approximately one mile, cross Old
Georgetown Road, and the parking garage entrance is the second driveway
on your left. If you are coming north on Wisconsin or west on Rt.
410, take Old Georgetown Road north, turn left at the second traffic
light (Woodmont Ave.) and the garage entrance will be on your left
(it's the second driveway). Take the elevators from the parking
garage to the plaza level (P). The building is located at the center
of the plaza. County and American flags and a sign bearing the County
seal mark the entrance to the building.
By Metro, Bus or on Foot:
The building is located across the street from the Bethesda Metro
station. From the Bethesda Metro Station, take the escalator from
the bus bay to the plaza level, turn left, walk past the clock tower
and across to the Metropolitan plaza using the pedestrian bridge.
If you are walking from any other location, the Center's street
entrance is at 4605 Edgemoor Lane (corner of Old Georgetown and
Edgemoor) and is marked with County and American flags. Take the
elevator to level 2 for meeting rooms.
Directions to Dinner:
La Madeleine is located at 7607 Old Georgetown Rd, Bethesda, MD
20814. The restaurant is a short walk from the Bethesda metro stop. View
the MapQuest Map
