💡 Your Backlog for Observation Exercises

• Cafe
• Riding a Bus
• Shopping for IKEA furniture
• Continue adding to this list!

Tips for conducting observation exercises:

“You may not get to wear a disguise or crawl about on the carpet with a magnifying glass, but here are some things we can learn from Holmes to improve our observation skills:

• Don’t worry about the relevance of the information you are capturing
• Avoid applying any kind of filter based on your assumptions or expectations
• Don’t judge information yet!
• Remember that participants are the experts, you are the “novice”
• Focus on the most typical tasks, typical days
• Find out what activities precede and follow the task you are observing
• Look for inconveniences, delays and frustrations
• Shadow people! Follow them wherever they go
• Get copies of documents, forms, artifacts of any kind
• Make diagrams of the workspace