Touchstone Tours

A Touchstone Tour involves the user taking you on a tour of a space, while you record their thoughts on what happens where, how services work, and what is significant to the user. The name comes from the idea that we want to understand their ‘touchstones’: the most significant collections, services or spaces that influence the way they feel, work and socialise. 

You can learn a lot from what the participant tells you, and also what they don’t: for example, we’ve had students take us on Touchstone Tours of the entire Library in which they’ve not taken us to the Burton Library at all. This in itself is revealing, and you can ask questions to find out more about why areas are not considered significant enough to visit. 

Although there is value in using Touchstone Tours on their own, most of the time we would recommend using them with Semi-Structured or Unstructured Interviews so you can drill down into the details of the tour. In early UX projects in the Library we used Touchstone Tours and Cognitive Maps and Unstructured Interviews with the same participants, which was very insightful but can be hard to fit into an hour. 

You will need to book a meeting room if you want to follow-up the Touchstone Tour with an Interview. You will also require specific and informed, signed consent from the user for the Touchstone Tour, on a separate consent form and distinct from the consent for the Interview. As always go to this folder to find the most recent Consent Forms to copy and adapt for your project.

We’ve only used Touchstone Tours once, for Summer UX but don’t let that deter you - if it’s the right methodology for your project it would be great to do more of it.

Touchstone Tours are often most useful when the subject of your research is a specific space or area (rather than a cohort or group), but they’re not limited to this. If, for example, you want better understand PostGraduate students, inviting them to take you on a Touchstone Tour of your building will probably help with that understanding, even if you don’t plan to radically change your building any time soon. 

Ultimately if you want to see your spaces through the eyes of the user, a Touchstone Tour is a good idea.

You will need a number of materials to carry out Touchstone tours:

A session of Touchstone Tours typically includes the following steps:

1. Brief the participant about what the wider project is trying to achieve, and then what a Touchstone Tour is. Emphasise that they should take you around the building and just talk about what they see and what is important to them. Make it clear that they are in charge, and that you’re not there to lead them or even correct them if they’re mistaken about anything: you may ask questions to seek clarification or prompt ideas, but that’s it.
2. Allow half an hour or so for them to take you round the space (depending, of course, on the size of the area). Ideally the tour would then segue into an Interview to explore the themes in more depth.

Because Touchstone Tours are almost always tied in with an Interview of some kind, the analysis often gets tied into this too. But they can be analysed in their own right, particularly in terms of which sections of the building are most and least popular. It would be possible to apply Andrew Ashers Identification Index and Representativeness Index (described in the Analysing Cognitive Maps section of this toolkit) to data gathered from Touchstone Tours, which is something we’d recommend doing. 

The type of touchstone tour described above is all about the user taking you through a library space. Some researchers have done interesting variations on this - for example the user taking the researcher through their online spaces, their desktop PC, their file store, or even their backpack / bag. We’ve never done these at York and the ethics / consent would be at best complicated to work out, so if you want to try any of these variations I’d proceed with caution.

A related methodology is to set tasks for the user in the building and observe how easy or difficult it is to complete the task. For example you might say to the user ‘find me the book UX in Libraries Yearbook’ and follow their entire process of working out where it is and physically retrieving it from the bookshelf - this is useful for understanding the library through the users’ eyes, and seeing where signage isn’t adequate or clear. You can either make notes or, in an ideal situation, borrow some glasses which record video from the Computer Sciences department. (For clarity, the user wears the glasses, not you…) 

This method is good for trying to solve a specific problem; the classic touchstone tour will reveal wider and more holistic insights into how people use and perceive the library (or indeed any other space you do this in).