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Principles of
Contextual Inquiry

The core premise of Contextual Inquiry is very simple: go where the customer works, observe the customer as he or she works,
and talk to the customer about the work. Do that, and you can’t help
but gain a better understanding of your customer.

That is the core of the technique, but we find people are generally
happy to have a little more guidance. What do interviewers do at the
customer’s site? How do they behave? What kind of relationship
allows customers to teach designers the depth of knowledge about
their work necessary to design well?

In Contextual Design, we always try to build on natural human
ways of interacting. It is easier to act, not out of a long list of rules,
but out of a simple, familiar model of relationship.
A list of rules says, “Do all these things”-you have
to concentrate so much on following the rules you
can’t relate to the customer. It’s too much to remem-
ber. A relationship model says, “Be like this”-stay in
the appropriate relationship, and you will naturally
act appropriately (Goff man 1959).

Design processes work
when they build on
natural human behavior

Many different models of relationship are available to us. A for-
mal model might be scientist/subject: I am going to study you, so be
helpful and answer my questions; it doesn’t really matter whether you
understand why I’m asking. A less formal model
might be parent/child: I’ll tell you what to do, and
you’ll do it because you want my approval (or else
you’ll rebel to show your independence). Each of
these models brings with it a different set of atti-
tudes and behaviors. Everyone knows what it is like

Use existing relationship
models to interact with
the customer

42 Chapter 3 Principles a/Contextual Inquiry

when someone treats us like a child, and the resentment it generates.
Ironically, the natural reaction is to behave like a child and fight back.
Relationship models have two sides, and playing one side tends to pull
the other person into playing the other side. Find a relationship model
that is useful for gathering data, and as long as you play your role, you
will pull the customer into playing theirs.

THE MASTER/APPRENTICE MODEL

The relationship between master craftsman and apprentice is an effec~
tive model for collecting data. Just as an apprentice learns a skill from
a master, a design team wants to learn about its customers’ work from
its customers. Though the model is no longer common, it is still suffi~
ciently familiar that people know how to act out of it. When they do,
it creates the right behaviors on both sides of the relationship for
learning about the customers’ work. We find that people with no spe~
cial background in ethnography learn how to conduct effective inter~
views much more quicldy by acting like an apprentice than by memo~
rizing a list of effective interviewing techniques. Building on this
relationship model creates a strong basis for learning about work

Craftsmen, like customers, are not natural teachers, and teaching
is not their primary job. But they do not need to be; the master crafts~
man teaches while doing. A master does not teach by designing a
course for apprentices to take. Nor does a master teach by going into a
conference room and discussing his skill in the abstract. A master
teaches by doing the work and talking about it while working. This
makes imparting knowledge simple.

Teaching in the context of doing the work obviates any need for
the craftsman to think in advance about the structure of the work he

does. As he works, the structure implicit in the work

When you’re watching
becomes apparent because both master and appren~
tice are paying attention to it. It is easy for the master
to pause and make an observation or for the appren~
tice to ask a question about something the master

the work happen, learning
is easy

did. Observation interspersed with discussion re~
quires little extra effort on the part of either master or apprentice.

Similarly, in Contextual Inquiry, team members go to the cus~
tomers’ workplace and observe while they are immersed in doing their

The master/apprentice model

work. Like the driver of a car, customers don’t think about how they
are working. But they can talk about their work as it unfolds. They do
not have to develop a way to present it or figure out what their
motives are. All they have to do is explain what they are doing, as does
this user of a desktop publishing product:

I’m entering edits from my marked-up copy here … I’m
working in 200% magnification so I can really see how things
line up. It doesn’t matter that I can’t see all the text in this
magnification because I’m not checking for continuity or nat-
ural flow of words; I’ll do that in another pass later ….

Even if the master were a good teacher, apprenticeship in the con-
text of ongoing work is the most effective way to learn. People aren’t
aware of everything they do. Each step of doing a
task reminds them of the next step; each action taken
reminds them of the last time they had to take such
an action and what happened then. Some actions are
the result of years of experience and have subtle

Seeing the work reveals
what matters

motivations; other actions are habit, and there is no longer a good rea-
son for them. The best time to unravel the vital from the irrelevant and
explain the difference is while in the middle of doing the work.

This holds true for customers as well. They are not aware of every-
thing they do or why they do it; they become aware in the doing. l

Once we observed someone sorting his paper mail. He was
able to tell us exactly why he saved, opened, or threw out each
piece because he was in the process of making that decision.

Another time, a research scientist came to the end of a
painstaking series of mechanical calculations, turned to us,
and said, “I guess you’re surprised that I’m doing this.” He was
surprised at how inefficient he was, once he stopped to think
about it.

But it is not natural to stop your work to think about it; the appren-
tice relationship provides the opportunity to do so.

Talking about work while doing it allows a mas-
ter craftsman to reveal all the details of a craft. As he
works, he can describe exactly what he is doing and

Seeing the work reveals
details

1 Polanyi (1958) discusses what tacit knowledge people have available for discussion
at different times.

43

46 Chapter 3 Principles of Contextual Inquiry

Contextual Inquiry seeks to provide rich detail about customers
by taking team members into the field. Once there, apprenticeship

suggests an attitude of inquiry and learning. It rec-

Contextual Inquiry is
apprenticeship compressed

ognizes that the customer is the expert in their work
and the interviewer is not. An interviewer taking on
the role of apprentice automatically adopts the
humility, inquisitiveness, and attention to detail in time
needed to collect good data. The apprentice role dis-

courages the interviewer from asking questions in the abstract and
focuses them on ongoing work. And customers can shape the inter-
viewer’s understanding of how to support their work from the begin-
ning, without having to prepare a formal description of how they
work or what they need.

THE FOUR PRINCIPLES OF

CONTEXTUAL INQUIRY

Apprenticeship is a good starting point, but it is only a starting point.
Unlike apprentices, interviewers are not learning about work in order

to do it; they are learning about it in order to sup-

Contextual Inquiry tailors
apprenticeship to the

port it with technology. Interviewers cannot afford
to spend the time an apprentice would take to learn
the work. Unlike an apprentice, members of the
design team contribute their own special knowledge
about technology and what it can do. Apprentices

needs of design teams

learn a single job, but different projects may require the team to study
a widely varying work practice-from the surgeon in the operating
theater, to the manager in a high-level meeting, to the secretary at a
desk, to the family in front of the video game. Designers meet the
needs of a whole market or department, so they must learn from
many people-individuals doing the same kind of work and individu-
als doing very different tasks and taking on different roles in order to
get the work done.

The basic apprenticeship model needs modifications to handle a
design team’s needs and situation. Four principles guide the adoption
and adaptation of the technique: context, partnership, interpretation,
and focus. Each principle defines an aspect of the interaction. Together,

The four principles of Contextual Inquiry

they allow the basic apprenticeship model to be molded to the partic~
ular needs of a design problem. We will describe each principle and
how to use it in turn.

CONTEXT

The principle of context tells us to go to the customer’s workplace and
see the work as it unfolds (Whiteside and Wixon 1988). This is the
first and most basic requirement of Contextual
Inquiry. Apprenticeship is a fine example of doing
this; the apprentice is right there to see the work. All
the richness of real life is there, able to jog the cus~
tomer’s memory and available for study and inquiry.

Go where the work is
to get the best data

The customer made a phone call in the middle of doing a task. Is this
relevant to the work? Was she calling on an informal network of
experts to get help in the task? Someone stops by to get a signature on
a form. What is the customer’s role in this approval process? Do they
talk about it before she signs? What are the issues?

Context tells us to get as close as possible to the ideal situation of
being physically present. Staying in context enables us to gather ongo~
ing experience rather than summary experience, and concrete data rather
than abstract data. We’ll describe each of these distinctions in turn.

SUMMARY VS. ONGOING EXPERIENCE. We are taught
from an early age to summarize. If someone asks a friend about a
movie she saw last week, she does not recount the entire plot. She
gives overall impressions, one or two highlights, and the thing that
most impressed or disgusted her. (Never ask a seven~year~old that
question-they haven’t yet learned to summarize and will tell you the
entire plot of the movie in excruciating detail.) Ask people to tell you
about their experience with a new system, and they will behave just
the same way. They will give their overall impressions and mention
one or two things that were especially good or bad. They will have a
very hard time saying exactly why the good things were important, or
why the bad things got in the way. That would require that they be
able to talk about the details of their work, which is very hard to do.

We once asked a secretary how she started her day. Her
answer was, “I guess I just come in and check my messages
and get started.” She wasn’t able to go beyond this brief

47

48 Chapter 3 Principles of Contextual Inquiry

summary overview. It was the first thing in the morning and
she had just arrived at the office, so we asked her to go ahead
and do as she would any other morning. She unhesitatingly
started her morning routine, telling us about it as she went:
“First I hang up my coat, then I start my computer. Actually,
even before that I’ll see if my boss has left something on my
chair. If he has, that’s first priority. While the computer’s com-
ing up, I check the answering machine for urgent messages.
There aren’t any. Then I look to see if there’s a fax that has to
be handled right away. Nope, none today. If there were, I’d
take it right in and put it on the desk of whoever was respon-
sible. Then I go in the back room and start coffee. Now I’ll
check the counters on the copier and postage meter. I’m only
doing that because today’s the first of the month …. ”

This person’s morning routine has a definite structure: first she
checks all her communication mechanisms to see if there is an imme-
diate action that needs to be taken, then she startS the regular mainte-
nance tasks of the office. But this structure is invisible to her. It would
not even occur to most people as a topic of conversation.

Avoid summary data
by watching the work
unfold

The job of the interviewer is to recognize work
structure. Discovery of work structure arises out of
this level of detail about mundane work actions.
Summary experience glosses over and hides this de-
tail. Being present while the work is ongoing makes
the detail available.

ABSTRACT VS. CONCRETE DATA. Humans love to ab-
stract. It’s much easier to lump a dozen similar events together than to
get all the details of one specific instance really right. Because an
abstraction groups similar events, it glosses over all the detail that
makes an event unique. And since a system is built for many users, it
already needs to abstract across all their experience. If designers start
from abstractions, not real experience, and then abstract again to go
across all customers, there is little chance the system will actually be
useful to real people. Even in the workplace, customers easily slide
into talking about their work in the abstract. But there are signals that
indicate the customer needs to be brought back to real life.

If the customer is leaning back and looking at the ceiling, he is
almost always talking in the abstract. This is the position of someone

The four principles of Contextual Inquiry

who will not allow the reality all around him from disrupting the con-
ception he is building in his brain. Someone talking about real experi-
ence leans forward, either working or pointing at some representation
of what he is talking about. Words indicating the customer is general-
izing are another signal. If the customer says, “generally,” “we usually,”
“in our company,” he is presenting an abstraction. Any statement in
the present tense is usually an abstraction. “In our group we do … ”
introduces an abstraction; “that time we did … ” introduces real expe-
rience.

The best cure is to pull the customer back to real experience con-
stantly. Every time you do this, you reinforce that concrete data mat-
ters, and you make it easier to get concrete data next
time. If the customer says, “We usually get reports
by email,” ask, “Do you have one? May I see it?”
Use the real artifacts to ground the customer in spe-
cific instances. If the customer says, “1 usually start
the day by reading mail,” ask, “What are you going

Avoid abstractions by
returning to real artifacts
and events

to do this morning? Can you start?” Return the customer to the work
in front of him whenever possible.

Sometimes the work that you are interested in happened in the
past and you want to find out about it, so you need to elicit a retrospec-
tive account. Retelling a past event is hard because so
much of the context has been lost. People are prone
to giving a summary of a past event that omits nec-
essary detail. Most people will start telling a story in
the middle, skipping over what went before. They

Span time by replaying
past events in detail

will skip whole steps as they tell the story. The interviewer’s job is to
listen for what the customer is leaving out and to ask questions that
fill in the holes. Here is an example of walking a customer through a
retrospective account. The customer is talking about how they dealt
with a report. We’ve interpolated the dialog with the missing steps
that the interviewer is hearing in the data.

Customer: When I got this problem report I gave it to Word
Processing to enter online-

(Why did she decide to give it to Word
Processing? Did she do anything first?)

Interviewer: So you just handed it on automatically as soon as
you got it?

49

50 Chapter 3 Principles of Contextual Inquiry

c: No, it was high priority, so I read it and decided to send a
copy to the Claims department.

(How did she decide it was high priority? Is it
her decision?)

I: How did you know it was high priority?

C: It has this green sticker on it.

(Someone else made the decision before the
report ever got here. Who and when?)

I: Who put on the green sticker?

C: That’s put on by the reporting agency. They make the
decision about whether it’s high priority and mark the report.

(We can better pursue how the reporting
agency makes the decision with them; we’ll
only get secondhand information from this
user. Instead of trying to go further backward,
look for the next missing step forward:
doesn’t Claims get a more personal
communication than just the report?)

I: Did you just send it on to Claims, or did you write them a
note about why they needed to see it?

C: Oh, I always call Claims whenever I send them one of these
reports.

At each step, the interviewer listened for steps that probably hap-
pened but the customer skipped and then backed the customer up to
find out. In this process, the customer walked through the steps in her
mind, using any available artifacts to stimulate memory, and recalled
more about the actual work than she would if allowed to simply tell
the story in order. Using retrospective accounts, the interviewer can
recover past events and can also learn more about events in progress.
If the end of a story hasn’t yet happened, the most reliable way to
learn about that kind of situation is to go back to a previous occur-
rence that did complete and walk through it. Trying to go forward
and find out what will happen next forces the customer to make
something up; going to another past instance allows the customer to
stay concrete.

The four principles of Contextual Inquiry

The key to getting good data is to go where the work is happen-
ing and observe it while it happens. Observing ongoing work keeps
the customer concrete and keeps them from sum-
marizing. Keeping to the apprenticeship model
helps with this; the apprentice wants to see and as-
sist with real work. If the customer starts telling sto-
ries, the interviewer can (exerting a little more con-
trol than an actual apprentice would) either redirect

Keep the customer
concrete by exploring
ongoing work

him to ongoing work or delve into the story, using a retrospective
account to get all the detail possible.

PARTNERSHIP

The goal of partnership is to make you and the customer collaborators
in understanding his work. The only person who really knows every-
thing about his work is the one doing it. The tradi-
tional interviewing relationship model tilts power too
much toward the interviewer. The interviewer con-
trols what is asked, what is discussed, and how long is
spent on a topic. This won’t get you design data-

Help customers articulate
their work experience

you don’t know what’s important to pay attention to, and you don’t
know what will turn out to matter. The apprenticeship model tilts
power, if anything, too much toward the master-customer. It suggests
that the customer is in full control, determining what to do and talk
about throughout the interview. Traditional apprenticeship would
reduce the interviewer to asking a few questions for clarification, at best.

This is too limiting for an interviewer understanding work prac-
tice. An interviewer’s motive in observing work is not that of the
apprentice. Apprentices want to know how to do the work; inter-
viewers want data to feed invention of a system that supports the
work. Apprentices are assumed to bring no useful skills to the rela-
tionship. Any skills they happen to have they subordinate to learning
the way the master goes about working. Designers may not be
experts in doing the work, but they must develop expertise in seeing
work structure, in seeing patterns and distinctions in the way people
organize work. An interviewer has to create something that looks
more like a partnership than like an ordinary apprenticeship. This
allows them to engage the customer in a conversation about the
work, making the customer aware of aspects of the work that were

51

The four principles of Contextual Inquiry

The key to getting good data is to go where the work is happen-
ing and observe it while it happens. Observing ongoing work keeps
the customer concrete and keeps them from sum-
marizing. Keeping to the apprenticeship model
helps with this; the apprentice wants to see and as-
sist with real work. If the customer starts telling sto-
ries, the interviewer can (exerting a little more con-
trol than an actual apprentice would) either redirect

Keep the customer
concrete by exploring
ongoing work

him to ongoing work or delve into the story, using a retrospective
account to get all the detail possible.

PARTNERSHIP

The goal of partnership is to make you and the customer collaborators
in understanding his work. The only person who really knows every-
thing about his work is the one doing it. The tradi-
tional interviewing relationship model tilts power too
much toward the interviewer. The interviewer con-
trols what is asked, what is discussed, and how long is
spent on a topic. This won’t get you design data-

Help customers articulate
their work experience

you don’t know what’s important to pay attention to, and you don’t
know what will turn out to matter. The apprenticeship model tilts
power, if anything, too much toward the master-customer. It suggests
that the customer is in full control, determining what to do and talk
about throughout the interview. Traditional apprenticeship would
reduce the interviewer to asking a few questions for clarification, at best.

This is too limiting for an interviewer understanding work prac-
tice. An interviewer’s motive in observing work is not that of the
apprentice. Apprentices want to know how to do the work; inter-
viewers want data to feed invention of a system that supports the
work. Apprentices are assumed to bring no useful skills to the rela-
tionship. Any skills they happen to have they subordinate to learning
the way the master goes about working. Designers may not be
experts in doing the work, but they must develop expertise in seeing
work structure, in seeing patterns and distinctions in the way people
organize work. An interviewer has to create something that looks
more like a partnership than like an ordinary apprenticeship. This
allows them to engage the customer in a conversation about the
work, making the customer aware of aspects of the work that were

51

52 Chapter 3 Principles of Contextual Inquiry

formerly invisible and bringing the customer into a partnership of
inquiry into the work practice.

John an

In one interview with a user of page layout software, the
user was positioning text on the page, entering the text and
moving it around. Then he created a box around a line of text,
moved it down until the top of the box butted the bottom of
the line of text, and moved another line of text up until it
butted the bottom of the box. Then he deleted the box.

Interviewer: Could I see that again?

Customer: What?

I: What you just did with the box.

C: Oh, 1m just using it to position this text here. The box
doesn’t matter.

I: But why are you using a box?

C: See, I want the white space to be exactly the same height as
a line of text. So I draw the box to get the height. (He
repeats the actions to illustrate, going more slowly.) Then
I drag it down, and it shows where the next line of text
should go.

I: Why do you want to get the spacing exact?

C: It’s to make the appearance of the page more even. You want
all the lines to have some regular relationship to the other
things on the page. It’s always hard to know if it really makes
any difference. You just hope the overall appearance will be
cleaner if you get things like this right.

I: It’s like everything you put on the page defines a whole web
of appropriate places for the other things to go.

The four principles of Contextual Inquiry

c: That’s right. Everything affects everything else. You can’t
reposition just one thing.

This is a common pattern of interaction during an interview.
While work is progressing, the customer is engrossed in doing it, and
the interviewer is busy watching the detail as it un-
folds, looking for pattern and structure, and think-
ing about the reasons behind the customer’s actions.
At some point the interviewer sees something that
doesn’t fit, or notices the structure underlying an

Alternate between
watching and probing

aspect of the work, and interrupts to talk about it. This causes a break
in the work, and both customer and interviewer withdraw from doing
the work to discuss the structure that the interviewer found. It is as
though they stepped into a separate conceptual room. The customer,
interrupted in the moment of taking an action, can say what he is
doing and why. The interviewer, looking at work from the ourside,
can point out aspects the customer might take for granted. By paying
attention to the details and structure of work, the interviewer teaches
the customer to attend to them also. When the conversation about
structure is over, the customer returns to ongoing work, and the inter-
viewer returns to watching. This withdrawal and return is a basic pat-
tern of Contextual Inquiry: periods of watching work unfold, inter-
spersed with discussions of how work is structured.

Over the course of an interview, customers become sensitized to
their own work and how it could be improved. Questions about work
structure reveal that structure to them so they can
start thinking about it themselves. “It’s like every-
thing you put on the page defines a whole web of ap-
propriate places for the other things to go.” This
comment suggests a way of thinking about the work.
It makes a previously implicit strategy explicit and

Teach the customer how
to see work by probing
work structure

invites a conversation about that strategy. Soon customers start inter-
rupting themselves to reveal aspects of work that might otherwise have
been missed. Over the course of the interview, a true partnership devel-
ops, in which both customer and interviewer are watching work struc-
ture, and in which both are thinking about design possibilities. (See
Chin et al. [1997] on maldng customers participants in analyzing their
own work.)

53

The four principles of Contextual Inquiry

c: That’s right. Everything afficts everything else. You can’t
reposition just one thing.

This is a common pattern of interaction during an interview.
While work is progressing, the customer is engrossed in doing it, and
the interviewer is busy watching the detail as it un-
folds, looking for pattern and structure, and think-
ing about the reasons behind the customer’s actions.
At some point the interviewer sees something that
doesn’t fit, or notices the structure underlying an

Alternate between
watching and probing

aspect of the work, and interrupts to talk about it. This causes a break
in the work, and both customer and interviewer withdraw from doing
the work to discuss the structure that the interviewer found. It is as
though they stepped into a separate conceptual room. The customer,
interrupted in the moment of taking an action, can say what he is
doing and why. The interviewer, looking at work from the outside,
can point out aspects the customer might take for granted. By paying
attention to the details and structure of work, the interviewer teaches
the customer to attend to them also. When the conversation about
structure is over, the customer returns to ongoing work, and the inter-
viewer returns to watching. This withdrawal and return is a basic pat-
tern of Contextual Inquiry: periods of watching work unfold, inter-
spersed with discussions of how work is structured.

Over the course of an interview, customers become sensitized to
their own work and how it could be improved. Questions about work
structure reveal that structure to them so they can
start thinking about it themselves. “It’s like every-
thing you put on the page defines a whole web of ap-
propriate places for the other things to go.” This
comment suggests a way of thinking about the work.
It makes a previously implicit strategy explicit and

Teach the customer how
to see work by probing
work structure

invites a conversation about that strategy. Soon customers start inter-
rupting themselves to reveal aspects of work that might otherwise have
been missed. Over the course of the interview, a true partnership devel-
ops, in which both customer and interviewer are watching work struc-
ture, and in which both are thinking about design possibilities. (See
Chin et al. [1997] on making customers participants …