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Preface

The motivation for writing this book came from several different directions. The key driver was that there has not been a good text that we could direct our students to that resonates with their interests and the problems they are addressing. There are some excellent texts from the social sciences and from healthcare, but they do not deal with problems of interaction design, user requirements or user experience when interacting with technology. Conversely, there are many excellent HCI texts that focus on observation, task analysis or research methods, but none that focus specifically on qualitative methods. We intend that this book should plug that gap.

A second motivation comes from the perennial question or challenge: what constitutes quality in qualitative HCI research? Is it even research? We should raise the quality of the discourse on what constitutes valid, reliable and valuable qualitative research in HCI. We should also raise the quality of that research, so that it becomes more valuable and has greater integrity.

We have chosen to draw on the analogy of going behind the scenes when making a documentary. Our main sources of inspiration for this have been Dom’s experience of making short films to communicate our research and Ann’s delight at watching “behind the scenes” footage on the making of wildlife documentaries (BBC, 2014). Of course, a qualitative study is expected to have a scientific rigour that is not expected of many documentaries, but they both share issues in gathering data, creating a narrative and representing some aspect of reality to inform an audience. Our focus on going behind the scenes means that we draw a lot on our own experiences, because we know what went on behind the scenes in our studies. So long as there is little tradition of reporting these details, that information is not accessible for other researchers’ projects, and it is difficult to be reflective about the work of others when you don’t have the insider knowledge. So we hope this book will encourage you to consider taking readers of your own research “behind the scenes”—providing them with useful detail and justification on what you did and why.

In this book, we are pre-supposing a good general knowledge of HCI, but less detailed knowledge of qualitative methods. Our primary audience is Master’s and Ph.D. students in HCI and related areas who are planning their individual projects. Other audiences include HCI practitioners who are planning in-depth studies, or people with a background in qualitative methods but who are new to HCI. We hope that this book will help you design and conduct excellent qualitative HCI studies.

Ann Blandford, Dominic Furniss and Stephann Makri, February 2016