Pat’s Point of View

Today I attended a pre-conference tutorial at OzCHI. The topic was Cultural Probes and it was run by Gerry Gaffney and John Murphy. It was very interesting and I can’t wait to use the technique on a real project.

I’ve blogged about the technique before, but in summary it’s a form of longitudinal user research for situations where you can’t normally go. For example, you might get your participants to keep a diary for a few weeks whilst they are renovating their house. Analysing what they give you back will give you very rich information about who they are, what they go through and what they think. (You’ll find a very good intro on Gerry’s Information & Design website)

I can see lots of situations where I could use this, along side other research techniques, to gain a much better understanding of an audience. Whilst the costs of producing the ‘kit’, and the participant incentives, might be higher than methods such as contextual enquiry, the amount of effort and person-hours required on the part of the design team are less (ie compared to direct observation). And of course the level of detail you get is much higher than techniques such as interviews or focus groups.

Anyway, off to finish my presentation for Friday.

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