Field studies are research activities that take place in the user’s context rather than in your office or lab. The purpose of field studies is to understand how and why people do what they do.

• Flexible user tests in the field, which combine usability testing with adaptive interviews—adapting your questions as you learn in the field.
• Customer visits can help you better understand issues that arise in particular industry or business contexts or those that appear at a certain scale.
• Direct observation is useful for conducting design research into user processes, for instance to help create natural task flows for subsequent paper prototypes. Direct observation is also great for learning user vocabulary understanding businesses’ interaction with customers, and discovering common workarounds.
• Ethnographic research situates you in the users’ context as a member of the group. Group research allows you to gain insight into mental models and social situations that can help products and services fit into people’s lives. This type of research is particularly helpful when you target audience lives in a culture different than yours.
• Contextual inquiry is a method that structures and combines many of these field-study activities.

Field studies are usually done when you need to gather task information to better understand how people do things and in what particular ways they do them. Also, to understand people’s needs, obtain data for journey maps, personas, user stories and more. Field studies also allow you to test systems or products under realistic conditions.

When might a field study be the right research methodology?

• You need big picture insights
• You don’t know enough about your actual prospective users
• You need to understand how people normally do their work and how they set up their environment to support their tasks.
• You don’t know enough about your users’ context (cultural, use, etc.)
• You need to understand how groups of people behave
• Your participants can’t travel to your location

When you should consider a different methodology?

• When what you’re testing may be confidential or private
• You need many observers present at the research session
• The focus is mostly on the users’ usability of the system, not their context
• When a remote study (which is cheaper and faster) will produce the same set of results