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We conducted an ethnographic field study examining the ways in which building design teams used visual representations of data to coordinate their work. Here we describe our experience with this field study approach, including both quantitative and qualitative analysis of field study data. Conducting a field study enabled us to effectively examine real work practice of a diverse team of experts, which would have been nearly impossible in a laboratory study. We also found that structured qualitative analysis methods provided deeper insight into our results than our initial quantitative approach. Our experience suggests that field studies and qualitative analysis could have substantial benefit in visualization and could nicely complement existing quantitative laboratory studies.
Tory et al. (2008) studied this question.