Tool details
Shadowing
Spending time with the people you are designing for in their right context to learn more about whatever that is relevant for the challenge.
Tool category:
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When to use
You need to understand how users behave in a normal situation and how your design could fit with their routines.
Why you should
Shadowing a user allows you to see how they behave in the real world, which can be different from how the say they behave.
What you get
Storyboard(s) of user's routines that allow you to understand how your design can fit in them.
Steps to take
Based on your design questions, define the activities that you want to understand better.
Find participants that are willing to shadowed for some hours (or even an entire day).
Arrange/schedule to follow participants throughout their day/activities.
Follow participants and capture the information. Sometimes it helps to ask participants to explain the reasoning they have for doing things in a certain way. You can interact with them when you need more details about something, but let them be in control of the activities in order to get an authentic experience of their behaviour.
Go over the information that has been captured. Make storyboards that include a timeline of actions and explanatory text. Analyse the data to gather insight.
Further reading
Make sure you have materials to capture the data that the participants feel comfortable with and give consent to use (audio/video recordings, not taking etc.). Also record information that you might not think is relevant to your product/service at first, it might come in hand later.