Contextual Inquiry
Overview
In accordance with the methods of contextual design as detailed by Holtzblatt et al, PhotoDev began the process in early September by developing an interview script and speaking with the client representative. From there, we recruited Gallery users for interview sessions to understand the roles and context in which users interacted with Gallery. We conducted interviews in person, over the phone and via electronic surveys. After each interview we held interpretation sessions in which the feedback data was collected and discussed to generate affinity notes. Once these notes had been compiled in full, we began the process of creating an affinity diagram. The results gave us valuable insights to the positive and negative aspects of the Gallery system.
Interviews
Because Gallery is widespread across the globe, it was difficult to arrange interviews in person. However, meeting face-to-face often provides more robust feedback from interviews and a better opportunity to probe users about the system. We made inquiries via email to find local Gallery users and were fortunate enough to locate one for our first interview. While the majority of subsequent interviews were held over the phone, this initial interview helped us to further develop the interview script. We followed this initial meeting with five phone-interviews from around the country and from a diverse set of users with varying experience in web-based content management. Finally, we had two respondants to our e-mail based questionairre which was adapted from our interview script.
Interpretation Sessions
We held three interpretation sessions in which responses were processed and interpreted one by one to generate notes that expressed the fundamental elements of their experience with Gallery. During these sessions the team posed questions, engaged in dialogue and drew models and diagrams to better understand the feedback we had received. In a variety of windowless rooms spread across central campus, the team finally compiled the data in the form of affinity notes and made ready to build the diagram.
Interpretation Session at Hatcher Graduate Library
Interpretation Session at Hatcher Graduate Library
The Affinity Diagram
Over the course of three days, the team spent some 15 hours building the diagram from the bottom up – grouping notes, identifying common themes between them, questioning the affinities that emerged during the session and revisiting them accordingly. Over this period the nine foot spread of butcher paper earned countless badges made from post-it notes, it was hung on the walls of numerous libraries and group study rooms, rolled up and carried by all the members of the group who bore it to and fro like dutiful soldiers. Around 2 am on September 24th the group finally added the few green notes that marked the completion of the diagram.
Affinity Diagramming: Just getting started.
Affinity Diagramming: Blue notes are up.
Affinity Diagramming: Almost there.
Key Findings
- Gallery users have a wide range of technical expertise and they spend differing amounts of time on Gallery.
- Users choose Gallery over its alternatives because it is free, open source, and offers greater control over content. However, using alternatives for editing and configuring has proven preferable.
- Because of the requirements for server integration, Gallery installation process is a major barrier to adoption for non-technical users
- Updating Gallery is problematic because it is unstable and technically difficult – especially on multiple installations.
- Gallery interface is generally cluttered and not easy-to-use and suffers from a variety of problems. In example, there is a lack of feedback and poor visual affordances. Also, users desire modern features such as drag-and-drop, region tagging and AJAX-like animations.
- Uploading pictures takes a long time and plug-ins are cluttered, redundant and hard to understand.
- Many features are seldom used, some features are unusable because they don’t function properly.
- Documentation is difficult to locate and obscure. Users look into multiple sources for solutions to problems.
- Various features are desired by users but don’t exist in the current version of Gallery.