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Contextual inquiry 0:51
A 51-second explainer of Contextual inquiry, narrated over the same demo you can try yourself.
Try the interactive Contextual inquiry demo
What this video covers
Contextual inquiry is interviewing people while they work, in their own environment, on their own real tasks - watching what they actually do and asking about it as it happens. You become the apprentice and they the master, so instead of a tidy account recalled at a desk, you get the messy reality: the workarounds, the interruptions, the context that no interview in a meeting room would ever surface.
Ask in a meeting room and you get the official version: "I log the job, then invoice it." Watch it happen on site and you see the truth - the signal drops, so they photograph everything and do it later from the van, one-handed, balancing the phone on the dashboard. The context held the real story, and only being there revealed it.
