Stefan Deuchler

Project & Role

Semester-long group project

UX Researcher

In a group of 5 students, we analyzed the hiring process for the yearly summer camps for high school students.  Using contextual inquiry, we identified workflow issues and user needs by exploring user experiences. The preliminary steps included meeting in person with one of the primary stakeholders to hear about initial concerns at WISE and what goals the stakeholders are committed to working towards, or why WISE requested consulting services and what stakeholders hoped to gain from the process. With this direction, our team members conducted background research concerning WISE’s history and the communities GISE serves, best practices for non-profit management and hiring, and best practices for workflows, to ground our next steps in the qualitative research process. 

Contextual Inquiry Interviews

We met with a total of 5 stakeholders and conducted qualitative interviews at each users's place of work. The goal of each interview was to have the interviewee walk us through a specific instance of each relevant task or workflow they perform in relation to staffing for the summer camps, allowing interviewees to freely share opinions, feelings, experiences, and whatever information they felt was most important to understanding the issues at hand. 

Contextual Inquiry interpretation sessions

After each interview, we came together as a group and analyzed the content of the interview. The interviewer would tell the rest of the group how the interview went and together as a group we would come identify the key issues. During the interpretation session, the notetaker would write affinity notes to capture the key points that came up during the interview, as well as insights and ideas gained during the interpretation session. 

Building the affinity diagram

After all interpretation sessions were held, we again gathered as a group and transferred our affinity notes onto sticky-notes. We then grouped our notes and started to put them on the affinity wall. This was the most creative and innovative part of the whole process and really showed the power of working as a group. Some notes were easy to put into clusters of common themes, others seemed not to connect with anything. By collaboratively clustering the notes and identifying the overarching issues, we pooled together all our combined experiences from interviews and interpretation sessions, as well as our independent research findings. 

Labelling groups and reorganizing the wall

We then labelled each stack of yellow sticky notes with blue notes to identify a common theme. 

Now it was time to find common themes  among the blue labels. This meant that we had to take down and regroup the clusters labelled with blue labels.

After we had regrouped the notes, we used pink sticky notes to further cluster the themes we identified with the blue labels. 

We finally summarized the ideas labelled with pink notes into the highest level of the hierarchy and used green labels for them. 

Learnings from the affinity wall

 It was a good exercise to be able to shuffle groups of labels around once we had identified initial clusters of yellow notes. It forced us to reconsider our blue labels and the stacks of notes underneath them. While reevaluating the blue notes, we realized that we had generated some powerful insights simply by creating the blue notes.  Once the wall was complete and we had all pink and green notes up, we had a completely different picture of our data. Looking at our completed wall, we were stunned with all the insights we had created that day. It would have been virtually impossible to synthesize our interviews with such clarity and acumen in such a short time.

Walking the wall

Now that our wall was complete and we felt the consolidated labels were accurate, it was time to present our wall to the rest of our class. We first introduced them to our project and told them some of our key findings. We then walked the wall together with our classmates.

This was again an invaluable source of inspiration for us. It was surprising how taking a step back again, asking questions and identifying missing pieces as a group was helping us to see our findings in a new light. The most satisfying aspect of this part of the process was that as a group, we were able to come up with a fresh set of  design ideas.  

Research paper and presentation

Armed with fresh design ideas and insights from walking the wall, we co-authored our final report. The goal was to underscore our findings and recommendations for our client with established research data. My focus was usage of information in (non-profit) organizations and I found various research articles and a book that helped me shape my findings with data. 

Finally, we presented our process to the class and then to our client. Being able to give our client actionable advice that would substantially simplify their workflows and processes was the most rewarding part of the project. Our client immediately understood our recommendations and a lot of our findings rang very true to them. The power of Rapid Contextual Design lies in gathering a lot of data in a short amount of time and presenting the findings and recommendations in a succinct and well-structured way that is actionable for the client.

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