What about using Grounded Theory Methodology keeping in mind Glaser's "All's data". You can use a variation of data, most of them naturally collected and can rely on other sources than interviews.

Thank you very much, Mr. Berg. I've read that it is very time consuming to use the Grounded Theory Methodology. As the context analysis is just a small part of the thesis, it should not be very time consuming. At the moment I try to find out via a competition analysis how old the customers could be, what's the target group and what are their tasks. I think a complete customer analysis is not possible, but at least some information can be found out as the bigger competitors seemingly already analyzed the market very well.

It's quite a hard requirement to perform contextual inquiry like this. I see your pain.

As an alternative you might also take people from your team / your environment, have them use the competions product and perform a usability test to create contextual data. Would that help you?

If you want to ground this procedure a little more you could create "proto" or "pseudo" personas using assumptions you have about the real users and then derive requirements from this for the usability test...

Also you might look into faq sections forums or ratings of competition products and see what they do well or poorly...

All of this really isn't optimal and a rather poor work around in my opinion. I hope this helps.

What about using group discussions?

Hello Mr. Berg,

of course, that would be great. My problem is the missing time. Now I decided to analyze the typical types of users as well as the tasks that they need to perform on the competing platforms. Later I will try to validate the generated prototype via a user test.

Thanks for your input.

Best regards,

Maurice Malherbe

A think aloud protocol would be a better way to validate the usage scenario.