AEIOU Method For Observational Research
What Is Observational Research?
Observational research consists of a researcher observing a subject, or subjects, within a natural environment. It is an ethnographical research done by many anthropologists as well as qualitative UX researchers who specifically study human interaction with physical objects (in-store shopping, VR users, users with physical disabilities, etc.). A common observational study for UX Researchers would be a contextual inquiry.
What Is The AEIOU Method?
The AEIOU method is a way to record specific heuristics during an observational study. It is an acronym for five different categories for observing and recording research data. The five categories are;
- Activities: Actions/behaviors people take to achieve their goals.
- Environments: Details describing the environment where activities take place.
- Interactions: Basic interactions that occur either inter-personal or with an artifact.
- Objects: Items used within the environment to achieve a goal. This could be direct or indirect usage.
- Users: Details about people being observed including, biases, needs, relationships, behaviors, and values.
How To Use AEIOU
Let’s use the example of observing someone ordering food at a sit-down restaurant.
Looking at the above insights from the observation, you can possible deduce a couple of key insights from the AEIOU method.
- The restaurant may be too dimly lit for people to read the menus.
- The music may be too loud causing people to speak louder.
- Loud music and loud table conversation may make it harder for the customer to hear their server.
Now, these insights are only based on 1 customer observation. The person above may be an outlier to the typical customer that this restaurant serves. You will want to perform this same process on multiple customers in order to gain more accurate data to see if other customers share any of the same behaviors and traits.
What To Do Once You Complete AEIOU?
Once you have completed multiple observations using the AEIOU method, you want to analyze your insights. There are several different ways to do this, but I will show you two that I use the most to help find patterns or occurring themes within the data.
Affinity Diagram
Take all your notes from all your observations and compile the information into an affinity diagram using AEIOU categories. Within each category, rearrange your notes to cluster common behaviors or themes. I find Miro or Lucidchart to be excellent digital whiteboards to help you rearrange and group notes collaboratively with your team. While the ‘E’ (environment) category may not provide much insight if you were observing people in the same environment, you should be able to find commonalities among people and how they interacted within the environment.
Thematic Analysis
This process requires a little more labor than an affinity diagram but provides a more quantifiable insight into your observations. To apply thematic analysis to your insights, scan through all you notes (you may have to do this several times), and notice any possible themes or patterns that occur. Give each theme or pattern a code that can later be used to score in a data analysis tool or spread sheet like Excel. Once you total all the numbers as quantifiable data, you can then begin to visualize the data at a more precise level than you can with an Affinity Diagram. Depending on your skill level with data analytics tools, this method will also allow you more easily edit and transform you insights.
