Our two-week contextual inquiry process resulted in an assortment of products, artifacts and documents that were shared among team members. These assets aided us in creating user groups, developing interview questions and generally gaining more knowledge about the physical drive-in space itself.

First-person Research

Preliminary research involved a member of Team Retro attempting to find drive-in theaters near them to visit in person. The team member resides in Massachusetts and first used a "drive-in theaters near me" Google search to locate the nearest drive-in; however, the filtering options were sparse, and much of the legwork had to be done individually. See below for documentation of an in-person visit to the Rustic Tri-View Drive-in in North Smithfield, Rhode Island:

Identifying User Groups

The first step to collecting interview data was determining who we needed to interview. We referred to our original project plan where we identified our customers and stakeholders. Regardless of what features and solutions end up in our product, we needed to form a better understanding of the overall subject matter, environment, and holistic needs of these various user groups. We decided it was important to include 4 main user groups in our contextual inquiry so that we are framing the bigger picture, and to more accurately capture the features that will drive the refined scope and target group for our prototype.

The 4 user groups:

• Owners - The drive-in operators; business owners. It was important to interview them to better understand the environment, unique limitations, business models, their ideas, experiences, to consider in the stakeholder view of our project - especially since we have decided to focus on the customer experience for the prototype.

• Existing Users - Customers that have been to drive-ins before. We further define this as any experience during your lifetime and have additional questions that inquire on frequency and any changes to visitation. The questions we asked focused on better understanding their past experiences.

• Performers - People that work in the entertainment industry and have performed at live venues. Some of our initial ideas for our product involve introducing new forms of entertainment, so these are potential entertainers at drive-ins that we wanted to get insight into their unique needs and perspectives.

• New Users - People that have never been to a drive-in and/or do not have any knowledge of drive-ins. We thought it would be important to understand why they have never been, and to embrace the perspective of a first-time visitor.

Preparation

We prepared for interviews by creating a set of template questions (see artifacts section) for each user group. These templates consisted of roughly 10 questions each with different sub-questions to help guide the interviewer during the session to spark natural conversation. Each template explores the day-to-day activities, environment, needs, wants, and experiences that are unique to that group. We also compiled an introduction that could be used by the interviewer, as well as a general set of demographic questions that would be used for all interview types.

We wrote a "recruiting statement" to keep our methods consistent, and aid in efficiency with collecting participants. Each team member was tasked with reaching out to various users that would fall into each group to collect a rough tally of our expected participation before our planned interview start date. This ensured we had representation from each group, and substantial interviews to drive our interpretation session.

Conducting The Interviews

Our interviews were conducted through a variety of methods including phone calls and video conferences, as well as artifacts collected from a past on-site experience by Kiley. Unfortunately due to the showtime schedules and COVID-19, we were unable to visit a drive-in before the planned interview completion date in our schedule. We ended up with interviews from 2 Owners, 7 Existing Users, 2 Performers, and 6 New Users for a collective total of 17 interviews.