You’ve finally got approval to do B2B field research, and you want to study future customers as well as current ones. But when you try to visit your target users—IT staffers, customer support people, purchasing agents, product managers—their companies won’t allow outsiders to visit. How can you learn about people’s context of work if you can’t observe it?
Name 1 has been a missionary for field research for over 20 years; Consultancy A first performed contextual inquiry in 1996 at call-center sites in the U.S. and Europe. Today half of our engagements are field research—but we’ve recently observed increasing resistance to site visits at businesses, perhaps because of growing sensitivity worldwide to security issues. In response, we have developed a toolkit of methods to glean ethnographic data without visits to business settings.
This session describes our methods and tips for ensuring the voices of customers are heard in—or at least from—their environments, illustrated by case histories of ethnographic research with business users.
