Summary: Unsure where to start? Use this collection of links to our articles and videos to learn about ethnographic methods like field studies and diary studies — methods that help you learn about your user’s context.
Context methods (such as field and diary studies) provide insights about a users’ real-life environment and behaviors and shed light on how products are used in a natural context.
Here’s a list of NN/g’s most useful introductory articles and videos about context methods (field studies and diary studies), as well as some related topics. Within each section, the resources are in recommended reading order.
Many UX-research methods involve asking users to pretend they’re in a realistic but hypothetical situation. For example, in a usability test, participants may be given the task to book a hotel room for an upcoming vacation to Croatia. While we hope that users will behave as if they really were planning a vacation, there might some important contextual details we’d miss out on with this method.