More about Visit Survey
Also called field visits, visit surveys uncover unmet needs to guide design direction. No anthropology expertise required—simpler than assumed, they build researcher empathy through direct environmental immersion. Reveals user behaviour, personal inventory, cultural influences, and task performance challenges.
How to conduct: Recruit users, visit individually or grouped (shared environments yield common insights). Multiple users in one space reveal interpersonal dynamics via environmental connections.
How to probe: Avoid yes/no questions. Use scenario-building or request guided tours for deeper responses. Example: If users join local health clubs, explore frequency, preferences, barriers.
Internal applications: Study organizational departments—workstation layouts, object organization, digital/non-digital tools.
How to conduct Visit Survey?
For conducting a visit survey, the researchers first recruit the potential users, and then the survey is conducted one by one for the sample group. However, if multiple users who make up the sample group work or live in the same environment then a lot of common observations lead to valuable insights for the project. In this case, visit survey not only makes way to determine the relationship users have with their environment but as the relationship they have with each other or how are the users connected through their environment.
How to probe in Visit Survey?
For example, if most members of the sample group are members of a health club in their locality. Additionally, visit surveys require the researcher to probe the users on their context, which can be time consuming when done for individual users and when trying to elicit meaningful responses from the users. The researcher must ensure that the questions asked do not lead to plain yes and no responses from the users.
Visit surveys can be valuable for internal projects in organizations as well, where the researchers can visit different departments within the same organization studying the state of the workstations, the placement or organization of objects on the desk, the kind of digital and non digital products the users use, among other things.
During the visit survey, the researcher can also develop different scenarios and probe the user about those scenarios or request them to give a Guided Tour to gain a better understanding of the user needs and behavior.
Advantages of Visit Survey
Provides inside view of user-environment-object relationships, prioritizing needs and behaviours.
2. Empathy building
Immersive context fosters researcher understanding of user challenges.
3. Rich insights
Uncovers needs, expectations, behaviours, and environmental task facilitation.
4. Contextual understanding
Informs meaningful design direction through lived environment observation.
Challenges of Visit Survey
1. Time-consuming
Individual visits plus probing extend duration significantly.
2. Skilled probing required
Needs well-designed open-ended questions; users may overlook environmental relationships or challenges.