Discovery & Research · master area
Observation / Field Research
Going to watch the named person do the activity, in real time, in their environment. The discipline most teams skip. Not interview. Not survey. The input to every witnessed baseline.
Owners: PO, Designer Phase it lives in: Before We Build The corpus principle this enacts: Witnessed, not described.
Where it lives in the chain
- Before We Build · Observation — the canon
How to do this
- Skill path — PO foundations · Step 2 · Designer foundations · Step 2 — the gated sequence for a first observation session
- Clinic — A brief that didn't witness — the failure mode this craft prevents
- Principle — Witnessed, not described
What a session looks like
90 minutes, sitting next to one named person, time-stamped notes, no interview during. The three anchored questions afterwards: what was that thing you did at [time], and why?
Related crafts
- Interview Technique — the after tool, not the during tool
- Journey Mapping — the artefact the observation feeds into
- Assumption Surfacing — the not witnessed counterpart