Introduction

It’s difficult to identify gaps in one’s own understanding. Reading and discussing issues with other UX professionals and subject-matter experts can help; but, especially when designing new things with new technologies and capabilities, it’s best to begin by taking an open mind to where the action is.

UX researchers are responsible for learning about users, their goals, challenges, and activities, and for bringing that understanding to the organization. Lab-based studies and analytics can help only to the extent that you ask the right questions and look in the right places for the right data. Studying users and tasks in context can inform design decisions and can put the focus on outcomes, not features. When you notice gaps in your knowledge or understanding, it may be time to get out of the office and investigate, watch, and learn.

What Is a Field Study?

Definition: Field studies are research activities that take place in the user’s context rather than in your office or lab.

The range of possible field-study methods and activities is very wide. Field studies also vary a lot in terms of how the researcher interacts (or doesn’t) with participants. Some field studies are purely observational (the researcher is a “fly on the wall”), some are interviews in which the questions evolve as understanding increases, and some involve prototype feature exploration or demonstration of pain points in existing systems.

Examples of field studies include:

  • Flexible user tests in the field, which combine usability testing with adaptive interviews. Interviewing people about their tasks and challenges gives you very rich information. In an adaptive interview, you refine the questions you ask as you learn.
  • Customer visits can help you better understand usability issues that arise in particular industry or business contexts or those that appear at a certain scale.
  • Direct observation is useful for conducting design research into user processes, for instance to help create natural task flows for subsequent paper prototypes. Direct observation is also great for learning user vocabulary, understanding businesses’ interaction with customers, and discovering common workarounds — for example by listening in on support calls, watching people moving through amusement parks, or observing sales staff and customers in stores.
  • Ethnographic research situates you in the users’ context as a member of the group. Group research allows you to gain insight into mental models and social situations that can help products and services fit into people’s lives. This type of research is particularly helpful when your target audience lives in a culture different from yours.
  • Contextual inquiry is a method that structures and combines many of these field-study activities.

Field research is usually done with one of the following goals in mind:

  • Gather task information. You can find out how people do things today and why they do them in particular ways, before proposing something new. Early design research can help prevent big mistakes when creating products and services.
  • Understand people’s needs and discover opportunities for addressing them.
  • Obtain data for journey maps, personas, use cases, and user stories. Field studies help you to understand your users in depth, so you can better describe them for your team.
  • Test systems under realistic conditions. You can discover social defects and understand environmental factors before releasing products. Contextual research helps discover things you wouldn’t know to ask about, such as problems that crop up when new tools or processes are introduced into existing work practices.

When to Leave the Lab for the Field

Any of the following are good reasons for running a field study:

  • You need big-picture insights. Field studies can be done at any time, but it often makes sense to do them before design (or redesign) begins, because such research can lead to fundamental shifts in understanding your users and can change what you would design for them.
  • You don’t know enough about your actual or prospective users.
  • You need to understand how people normally do their work and how they set up their environment to support their tasks. Watching people do particular activities can illuminate what people really do versus what they say they would do. Field studies that focus on specific tasks help researchers learn how to improve the experience of doing them.
  • You don’t know enough about your users’ context:
    • Cultural context: For example, your users may live in a different region or country.
    • Context of use: Your customers may be using the interface or engage in a behavior of interest in a particular location or circumstance that is hard to replicate in the lab (for example, while walking, shopping, attending an event, riding the bus, or when it’s raining).
    Observing people in their natural environment allows you to learn the unexpected and to understand how well systems work when people are distracted, in noisy places, and in normal situations for them, such as with family, social, or work groups.
  • You need to understand how groups of people behave, for example to find out how they collaborate, interrupt, and communicate, or to watch people use systems, workflows, and tools together. With many people in the mix, you can observe a wide range of behavior, knowledge, experience, and concerns.
  • Your participants can’t travel to your location. For example, you may need to go where the users are when you’re conducting research with people with physical or transportation challenges, extremely limited availability (doctors or others who can’t leave work), or children at school.
  • Lab research might bias your results, for example because the tasks can’t all be done in a lab, the lab context is too unrealistic, intimidating, or otherwise excludes people whom you want to observe. Familiar surroundings and normal equipment are often preferred because they come closest to natural user conditions.
  • You need to work with systems you can’t access in the lab, such as B2B applications, specialized equipment (anything from bulldozers to battleships), or secure systems.

When You Might Want to Use Other Methods

If money were no object, we would probably all do much more field research. Unfortunately, field methods have not become cheaper at the same rate as other usability methods, and they can be challenging to budget or schedule. Field studies are still worthwhile, for example when you’re researching how and whether to make a new product, but it’s best to gather as much data as possible with cheaper methods. Beyond reasons of resource constraint, you might decide to stay out of the field in certain other cases.

Research in the Lab or Office

It’s sometimes best to conduct in-person research in labs, conference rooms, or other spaces that are not where people normally do the activity you want to study. For example: When what you are testing or researching is particularly confidential, sensitive, or private; when you have many observers for the research sessions; when you need to record but you can’t do that where participants work; when you’re testing systems or prototypes; or when the research focus is mainly on the usability of the system, rather than on people’s context, nature, and situation.

Remote, Attended Usability Research

UX researchers can get some of the advantages of both field and lab studies by conducting research live, using various audio–visual tools, with participants and facilitators each in their chosen locations. The remote, interactive approach can often be cheaper and faster than field or lab studies. Everyone avoids expensive and time-consuming travel to unfamiliar places. Being in your own space also offers comfort, familiar tools, and convenience.

A tradeoff with remote research is that you can’t see what the user’s camera doesn’t show you. That missing context is often important when you are trying to understand people and their environment.

Remote, attended studies make sense: When your participants are all over the map, and traveling to meet in person is too difficult or expensive; when it’s important to get some specific answers quickly and cheaply, and you already understand the people, tasks, and contexts in depth; when you need to conduct sessions a few at a time, for example when testing early designs with only a couple of users for each iteration.

How to Plan a Field Study

Make a research plan.

Location. Decide where best to observe people in action. Go where your potential users are most likely to be found: workplaces, schools, shopping centers, airports, and so on.

Assistance. When applicable, work with an ally onsite. When visiting a business, for example, you might need help recruiting, scheduling, reminding, rewarding, and briefing participants. An onsite helper can escort you, introduce you, and help you with equipment or space issues. You may need to get permission in advance to conduct research in public or commercial spaces.

Participants. Study people who are representative of your target audience groups. Depending on the research method you use, you might need a professional recruiter or a team member to help you screen and schedule people.

Observers. Decide whether to allow stakeholders to watch. Although it’s often strategically important and desirable to involve stakeholders in observing user research, it’s not always possible with field studies.

Sometimes observers won’t fit in the space, or they would make the research situation too intimidating or otherwise create a weird situation for the users. When that happens, you won’t get to observe the most natural behavior and you might not get the candid information that you need.

On the other hand, with B2B site visits to customer companies, it’s common for stakeholders from both companies to want to be present for the research sessions to some extent. Sometimes outside researchers can’t be left alone with participants, so observers must be present. Observers often need a place to sit, talk, and work through issues raised in your debriefings. Observers may also need guidance in how to observe and how to help collect data, so they won’t behave badly.

Conclusion

When you encounter problems or behavior that you don’t understand around existing products or services, field studies can help you take a step back and find a new perspective, in order to correct your own mental models.

Doing research where people are can be crucial to understanding whether new products and services will help, hinder, or fall flat for the people you aim to assist. Set aside assumptions and allow insights to reframe what you’re creating and how that will affect the experiences of the people you’re designing for.

(We can come to your team and teach a full-day course on how to conduct ethnographic field studies in your UX projects.)