In order to assess your client's web concerns, your team will collect information about its organizational context. Throughout your research, each team member should visit the client context at least twice. Your investigation of your client's context will consist of the three field research methods discussed in this document: an interview, document analyses, and an observation.

Before your team leaves class on T, 3/7 you should complete your team's Research & Project Planning Calendar to guide your work on Project 3.


interview

Conduct at least one interview of an established member of the client context; an interview with the client contact person likely is a good starting point for your team's data collection.


goals for interview

Your goals for your initial team interview are twofold:

1. to gain useful and relevant data about your client context.

2. to begin to assess which documents you want to collect and how you want to conduct your observation.

Your 45-minute to 1-hour interview provides you with an excellent opportunity to learn about how relationships function within your client context. As an established member of your client context, your interviewee has experience with the criteria, standards, priorities, and procedures related to different structures within the context. The goal of the interview process should be for you to gain insight into these experiences.


document analyses

Collect and analyze at least 2 documents from or related to your client context (e.g., policy statements, manuals, handbooks, memos, webpages, reports, forms, etc.).


goals for document analyses

Documents can provide you cues about the standards, expectations, and assumptions held by members of an organization. Documents from your client context can both provide information about the current situation at the organization as well as offer an historical perspective on the client's communicational context. Also, documents from related or similar (in terms of size, purpose, clientele, etc.) organizations can help your generate ideas that might be appropriate and effective for your client context


considerations for document analyses

After collecting your documents, you will need to analyze each of them in terms of your client's context and web needs. As you are analyzing the documents that you collect consider their:

Formal Features: The formatting, tone, and structure of a document are not accidental but instead are related to the functions and audiences perceived by a document's author/s. Thus, examining such features can provide insight into the significance (or lack thereof) of a document within a context.

Accessibility: The location, cost, and availability of a document also reflect its purposes within a context. Therefore, as you analyze a client document, consider how you became aware of it, how widely available it is, and how resources are/were allocated to its production, distribution, and maintenance.

Potential Audiences: Considering both primary and secondary audiences of a document is essential for determining its significance and functions. Thus, as you analyze a document, think about who does or does not consult it and why they do or don't.

observation

Your team should conduct at least one 45-minute to one-hour observation and compose detailed field notes for that focused visit.


goals for observation

Though each team member should visit the client site more than once, visits to conduct interviews and collect documents often do not provide you the opportunity to watch and record carefully the actions within the site. Thus, observing and taking notes about the dynamics within your client context can help you to cross-check your general impressions of the client's communicational context.


considerations for observation

The observation should allow you to research the dynamic relationships in your client context. Such research can provide insight into assumptions, values, expectations, procedures, etc. within your client context. Remember to consider issues such as geography of the space, relations among persons and objects, resource expenditures, and atmosphere or tone.