Abstract
Contextual field research contributes information about users and the context of usage into the product planning, design, and development process, to proactively guide it towards greater usability and usefulness of the end result. It also includes methods for evaluating usability of existing products under realistic usage conditions that take both usability and usefulness into account. Such research has become an indispensable component of usability practice and of user-centered design research generally. However, it is even more important for global products or for products being developed in one cultural context for use in another. At the same time, doing this research internationally is extremely challenging. Some of the challenges are magnifications of the difficulties of doing it domestically, and some are specific to international research. This chapter reviews the main challenges for doing contextual research internationally, and provides recommendations about how to manage them.
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Siegel, D.A., Dray, S.M. (2011). International Contextual Field Research. In: Douglas, I., Liu, Z. (eds) Global Usability. Human-Computer Interaction Series. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-85729-304-6_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-85729-304-6_5
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