Contextual Interview

What it is

A contextual interview is spending time with a person in their territory often in their home, social place or workspace combining loosely structured interviews and observations.

This technique stems from ethnography in which ethnographers spend months or even years living and observing people in different cultures. In the commercial context ethnographic work has time limitations therefore it is usually restricted to half a day or a few days.

Ethnographers importantly remind their participant to behave as naturally as possible; to do the things they would normally do with the people they would normally do them with and encourage them not to change their behaviour or put on a show for the researcher. The researcher has the sensitive challenge of conducting an interview without it seeming to be an interview, but rather a chat where questions and answers are exchanged in both directions. The best way to do this is to avoid taking notes (occasionally skirting off to the toilet to write them down before you forget!).

Interviews are often conducted with several different types of people for a particular project in order to achieve a broad array of insights. Finding the right people in a short space of time can be difficult. Cash based incentives are the best way to secure the right participants.

The beauty of good ethnographic work is in understanding the reality of people and not working on assumptions.


What you get

Contextual interviews can help to uncover the unknown unknowns. Spending time with a participant reveals a deep understanding of their behaviour, needs, problems, desire and motivations. The output of an interview is rich and meaningful observations and insights that build a story on the participant. The stories can be supported and emphasised by images and video clips.

When to use it

Ethnographic work is used to reveal subjective realities of how people experience different aspects of their lives, as opposed to market research, which is often conducted to verify and validate.

It is usually used in the early stages of a project. Often in service design the stories, observations and insights can be fed into a workshop as great stimulus for conversation and picking apart needs, problems and opportunities for innovation.

It can also be used to bring to life the reality of a strategy by understanding it from the end users perspective.