Colleen Page
Abstract
The user-centered design focus at Microsoft has evolved in parallel with emerging mobile technologies. We started with a Contextual Inquiry (CI) initiative in 1997 to gather mobile communication and information requirements in the Northwest U.S. Later, as users adopted wireless data services---Short Message Service (SMS), Wireless Application Protocol (WAP), mobile instant messenger, and email clients---the focus turned to more specific usage issues in key international markets. This article presents an overview of the evolution of the qualitative field research methods that have been used to respond to increasingly global research requirements.1
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Index Terms
- Mobile research strategies for a global market
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Reviews
Constantin S Chassapis
This article follows the field methods used by Microsoft during the upsurge of wireless device usage, and is a pleasant narrative of field research, product design, and ethnography. Microsoft launched a contextual inquiry (CI) initiative in 1997. The CI is an observation method in which the researcher, clothed in the role of an apprentice, "is learning how activities are performed from an expert" (the person or social group under observation). Paramount in the effectiveness of Microsoft's approach was the hiring and steady use of anthropologists. The author describes, for example, how, "by observing the use of paper artifacts in relation to mobile phone calls and information requirements[,] we developed a model of requirements for Windows Mobile-based products." Anthropologists will certainly occupy significant seats from now on in the product design teams, and field research will be conducted incessantly to align with continuous technological innovations. What happened at Microsoft is, in some respect, that some old dogs learned new tricks, although it is not entirely clear who the old dogs are in this context (the product design teams or the anthropologists) and what the new tricks are (aligning a product to a market, discovering people's needs so as to create new products, or the very use of methods and skills from ethnography and anthropology). If you are a usability engineer, reading this article will be fruitful and informative; if you are a manager in a product design team, this article is a must-read. Online Computing Reviews Service
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