CSE 590H Lab #2: Observation Lab

Date: April 6, 1995

Due: April 18 (Part 1)

Due: April 27 (Part 2)

Part 1: Ethnographic Field Exercises

Purpose:

Practice some basic ethnographic field methods. The emphasis in this part is on being unobtrusive and getting a broad picture of a situation, setting, or human practice.

Assignment:

Pick one of the below:
  1. Through observation and careful note taking investigate how space is employed in some area of your building or home. Explore the extent to which the area you study and the furniture within it keep people apart or draw them together. How does the arrangement of walls, doorways, hallways, furniture, machines, etc. effect the patterns of interaction you observe.

  2. Construct a map of an office area. Your map should show where people sit, their relationship to one another, the activities that go on at various locations, where "significant" objects are located. Describe how you gathered the information represented in your map (through observation, interview, available documents, etc). Include a key or legend to help others interpret your map.

  3. Locate an area where you can unobtrusively observe some activity. Observe the activity for 30 minutes or so. Take detailed notes of what is going on, including a sketch of the area, time of day, movement in and out of the scene, participants' relation to on another. You might want to develop a table to facilitate recording your observations.

  4. Any other exercise from the end of "Ethnographic Field Methods," by Blomberg, et. al.
We want you to try watching, note taking, observing a group of people or an overall situation at a distance. Attempt to get a feel for the dynamics of the situation at a level of social/physical/historical interactions. What can you learn by just observing? If you wish, talk to people involved in the situation (after you've observed them for a while -- remember, we want to be unobtrusive for at least a portion of this assignment), and contrast what you learned by watching to what you learned by interviewing.

Deliverables:

A short (1-4) page paper describing the experience. The 1-4 pages should include any necessary tables, drawing, photos, sketches, etc. Please feel free to use drawings, photos, or any non-verbal means to help portray the situation. If you made any audio tapes, feel free to include transcripts of interesting portions, if you wish.

Part 2: Uncovering Mental Models

Purpose:

To learn the details of a person's (or small group) mental models through direct observation and interviewing during and/or after they perform a specific task. The emphasis in this part is to gain detailed knowledge about the various models, representations, or languages used by a person or small group of people while they are performing a task.

Assignment:

Although it is not required, we would like you to focus on a computer based task in this part of the assignment. Although there are a lot of ways to do this exercise, we'd like to structure it as follows. Ideally, we'd like you to observe an "expert" teaching a "novice" how to use a piece of software. This will generally mean working in groups of 3 or 4, where two of the members act as "teacher" and "student" and the other members observe. However, because this might require excessive organization and time commitment to make sure that everyone gets a chance to observe, it is allowable to just work in a group of two, where one person works with a piece of software, and the other observes (giving a few hints now and again if the user gets stuck). Afterwards, the partnership can trade places (try to use different pieces of software). In general, we want you to be free with how you organize the session, as long as your writeup contains some details about how you structured it and what things worked well/poorly.

Here are some example domains:

Here are some rough guidelines for doing this assignment. Please note that it is a little more involved than Part 1.
  1. Find a partner or group.
  2. Develop your task. Be very specific, and make sure that your user can complete the task in 1/2 hour to an hour. For instance: In all cases, be sure that the user has a good mental picture/image of what they are supposed to be doing. Remember, you are watching them doing a specific task. It might be a good idea to run your task by someone else to make sure that it is "doable" in a half hour or so.
  3. Sit down with your partner/group, give the user the task, and observe. If they get stuck, give them just enough help to get them going again. If you are working in a group of two, be careful about merging the roles of "tutor" and "observer." This is a good reason to record the session on tape. Encourage your user to think out loud, while they are working on the task.
  4. Be sure to do your best to record the proceedings. We'd like to see at least two media used: notes, audiotape, videotape. There will be some details forthcoming about using department SGIs to video record the sessions.
  5. Do a writeup. See below for details.

    Deliverables:

    A slightly longer (2-5) page paper describing the experience. Be sure to describe the task, what recording media you used, and who you worked with. Please spend a significant portion of the writeup describing your observations and in particular, what you learned about the way the user approached the problem. Try to answer these kinds of questions: What mental models, metaphors, representations did the user bring to the task. How did these existing representations hinder or help them learn/accomplish the task? How did their representations change throughout the course of the session? How did the software and the features of its interface support/confuse/antagonize the user's model? How did you uncover their representations?