+---
+layout: post
+title:  The Four Principles of Contextual Inquiries
+description: Four principles to guide your contextual inquiry interviews and keep the research focused; leading to rich, useful data
+date:   2015-09-30 15:40:00
+author: David Herring
+platform: LinkedIn
+original: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/four-principles-user-interviews-david-herring
+category: blog
+---
+Before a team can improve a product, or create a product that’s an improvement on existing offerings, they have to know what users need and turn them into requirements. But gathering requirements isn’t simple a matter of asking users what they need. Just asking people what they want doesn’t work because people generally don’t know what technology is capable of, but mostly because people are really bad at explaining what they do day-to-day. So much of of a person's work is habitual and done unconsciously, making it difficult or impossible to articulate.
+
+People are pretty good at telling you what they’re frustrated with, but they’ll usually leave out the workarounds they invented to overcome your product's limitations. They do often suggest functionality, but their responses don’t reveal the consequences, motivations, and core values that fuel their desire for that functionality. If you can uncover these, you’ll discover insights that you can leverage in your product’s design that will absolutely delight your users.
+
+This article explains we at ATS discover these motivations and core values through a research method called a Contextual Inquiry Interview.

---
layout: post
title:  The Four Principles of Contextual Inquiries
description: Four principles to guide your contextual inquiry interviews and keep the research focused; leading to rich, useful data
date:   2015-09-30 15:40:00
author: David Herring
platform: LinkedIn
original: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/four-principles-user-interviews-david-herring
category: blog
---
Before a team can improve a product, or create a product that’s an improvement on existing offerings, they have to know what users need and turn them into requirements. But gathering requirements isn’t simple a matter of asking users what they need. Just asking people what they want doesn’t work because people generally don’t know what technology is capable of, but mostly because people are really bad at explaining what they do day-to-day. So much of of a person's work is habitual and done unconsciously, making it difficult or impossible to articulate.

People are pretty good at telling you what they’re frustrated with, but they’ll usually leave out the workarounds they invented to overcome your product's limitations. They do often suggest functionality, but their responses don’t reveal the consequences, motivations, and core values that fuel their desire for that functionality. If you can uncover these, you’ll discover insights that you can leverage in your product’s design that will absolutely delight your users.

This article explains we at ATS discover these motivations and core values through a research method called a Contextual Inquiry Interview.

Fix formatting from GitHub web
Fix formatting from GitHub web
