Reflections on conducting field research after a three year hiatus
I returned yesterday from a ten day field research trip to Helsinki. It was my first field research trip since September 2019 and my first in-person study since January 2020. I’m not sure I’ve ever had a hiatus from field work this long in my career. Even when I became a manager, I still did some IC work, especially field research.
Needless to say, I felt rusty.
But on the whole, the project went really well and went as smoothly as these things usually go. If you’re curious, we utilized a mixed methods approach similar to the one my co-authors and I describe in this paper.
And despite feeling very rusty at times, it felt so good to get back out there and talk to real people in their real world contexts about our products and how they fit in their lives. We all (the UXR community at large) made due with virtual research during the pandemic and while virtual research has a lot of merits, there is so much that we’ve missed by not talking to people in-context. For me, fieldwork fills my professional soul and I hadn’t realized how much I needed that inspiration until last week.
I’m not sure what percent of the UXR community is back to doing in-person research (let alone field research) so I figured I’d share some tips and reflections while everything is still…
