Our target audience is college students and the people that live in the communities around college towns. The contextual inquiry participants we plan to pursue are people that have already been building personal relationships between students and community members. Since there are several user groups that might be interested in our app, we hope to interview participants from each group. One target group is people that have already been in the process of facilitating a connection between students and community members. We will be reaching out to the Williams staff that organize the Thanksgiving on campus program, where students who cannot go home over Thanksgiving break are invited to the homes of Williamstown residents for a big holiday dinner, and observe how they go about organizing events of this nature in their office. We will also reach out to the families that have been involved in these meals to discuss the process of hosting students and observe how they volunteer their time. Additionally, we could interview a student or community member that is a regular at the Farmers’ Market, a small hub for transactional student-community interactions. This interview can be conducted on Saturday, when the market is open, while the other two depend on when we get responses from our participants, most likely next week.
In an ideal situation, we will be both observing the current behaviors of our targets and interviewing them about recent behaviors. We hope that we can see the staff member in action, organizing a community and college event, so that we can understand what the current process for planning such an activity involves and what the inefficiencies with the process are. We want to learn about what tools they use, how they work, whether or not they like the tools, etc. We also would like to interview them to learn about past events and learn about the attendance and interest from both sides, student and community, in these activities and what is the main barrier to participating in them. The interview with the host family will be mainly to observe how they get connected to the school in order to volunteer themselves for an activity like hosting Thanksgiving dinner. Is the process long and difficult? Is the opportunity to volunteer not widely known through the community? As non-community members, we will also be interviewing them about their feelings towards interacting with students and gauging their interest in more interactions. At the Farmers’ Market, we will be observing what students are interested in at the market and ask them questions about their behavior at the market such as whether they come often, if they are familiar with certain vendors, how they decide to strike up a conversation with a community member, etc. We will also interview them about their previous visits and how they have been able to interact with the community at the market, whether they enjoy it, and how the interaction experience could be made better.
The interviews we conduct will not be true contextual inquiries, but leaning more towards a UX interview in design, as that is what makes most sense for our project.