University of Michigan School of Dentistry | Contextual Inquiry

Timeline: September – December 20111

Course: Contextual Inquiry & Project Management

Team Members: Apoorva Bansal, Leigh Keller, Yu-Jen Lin, Andrea Neuhoff

Methods: Affinity Diagramming, Contextual Inquiry, Interviewing, Workflow Analysis

Project Scope & Role

My team was employed by the University of Michigan School of Dentistry to analyze the effectiveness of the information flow between a newly-centralized human resources center and their multi-departmental clients.

As the member of our team with the most extensive direct-client experience, my official role was that of client liaison. I was responsible for scheduling all interviews, regularly updating our clients on the progress of our project, and answering any questions that arose. We maintained a positive relationship with our client contacts and interview participants throughout the course of the project.

Unofficially, I played the role of team mediator. When disagreements emerged, I was able to effectively find middle ground for my team members and ensure that everyone’s ideas were being heard and respected.

User Research & Data Analysis

The heart of our research was ten interviews conducted with users of the system. We spoke with both staff of the human resources center as well as administrators and managers from various departments that use their services.

After each interview, our team met to go over what we learned and to create visualized representations of our data. We generated models in areas such as the flow of information and the physical environment, and created a cultural assessment, for which I was personally responsible. Over time, we consolidated these individual models in order to get a clearer picture of the work as a whole. Toward the end of the project, we created an affinity wall diagram with all of our interview notes in order to gain an even greater picture of the system, and to generate ideas for redesign.

Finally, we conducted several brainstorming sessions both in person and online where we developed our ideas more fully and transformed them into a clear set of recommendations to present to our clients.

Recommendations & Client Feedback

Our final deliverable for our client consisted of a report which defined our evaluation methods and findings, and proposed a detailed set of recommendations. We focused both on short-term, easily-attainable recommendations, as well as future-oriented recommendations for our clients to implement over time.

In a final meeting with our clients, they called our recommendations “spot-on” and indicated that they plan to implement the majority of them over time.