UX Glossary · C
Contextual inquiry
Also: Contextual interview
Watching someone do their real work in their real environment, and asking about it as they go.
Contextual inquiry combines observation and interview: the researcher watches a participant do their actual work, in the place they do it, asking questions in the moment rather than afterwards. Hugh Beyer and Karen Holtzblatt formalised it as part of Contextual Design in 1997.
The framing they proposed is a master and apprentice relationship. The participant is the expert doing their work; the researcher is the apprentice watching and asking why.
What it catches that interviews miss
People are unreliable narrators of their own routines. Not dishonest, just normal: the steps that have become automatic are the ones they stop mentioning, and workarounds get so naturalised that they no longer register as workarounds.
Being present surfaces what an interview cannot. The second monitor with the spreadsheet that the official system does not replace. The printed list taped to the wall. The colleague interrupting every ten minutes, which is why the task takes four times as long as it should.
In practice
It is expensive and worth it at the start of a project, when the risk is not knowing what the problem is. Even three or four visits usually reset the team’s assumptions.
For safety-critical and industrial work it is close to mandatory, because the environment is the constraint and it cannot be reconstructed from a meeting room.