Ethnography is the best research method to use when you need to discover the fundamental factors that influence the customer experience. Not the attributes of a given design, but the underlying framework that determines the quality of the customer or employee experience. Ethnography takes you to the source of the experience, and gives you tools to discover the most impactful factors.
Another situation that Ethnography deals with especially well are when you are seeking innovative design solutions for daily life situations. Ethnography is a structured approach for leaving behind current solutions and going back to the life context that the design serves.
Another situation in which ethnography is uniquely capable to provide answers is when the key concepts involved in an activity are not yet well defined or operational. For example, suppose we are trying to design a mobile app and one of the key success factors is convenience. Convenience is not a simple concept. It involves location and time and fulfillment. Until we can break this concept down into operational or observable components, we are stuck with a vague notion of what we need to do to succeed. Ethnography helps discover and operationalize concepts like convenience.
Of course, the bottom line is, that the value of the research has to outweigh the expense.
Copyright 2009, Paul Bryan, Usography Corporation (http://www.usography.com)
Linked In: http://www.linkedin.com/in/uxexperts
Copyright 2009, Paul Bryan, Usography Corporation (http://www.usography.com)
Linked In: http://www.linkedin.com/in/uxexperts
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e-commerce design strategy, e-retail, ethnography, methodology, personas
Anthropologists invented ethnography. Originally, “real ethnography” involved living among little known cultures that were very distinct from their own and participating in their rituals and society, and remaining there for long periods of time, typically measured in years.
I’ve been flamed by purists who say that what I’m doing isn’t real ethnography. If my team observes people in a cellphone store for one week, mapping their interactions and debriefing with salespeople afterwords to gain clarification, is that “real” ethnography? If a web design team spends a week interviewing people from their own culture in their homes, is that really ethnography?
That question is not important to me. I am concerned about the quality and rigor of research, and that the assertions I and my associates make can be substantiated. But I work in a design business. I want to use the most effective methods in the most cost-effective manner to obtain data that will help my clients create more successful design solutions. So, perhaps I’m deploying ethnographic methods to capture data rather than doing real ethnography. In some situations I may be adjusting research activities to save time or money, while not compromising my ability to answer the research questions that initiated the research.
So, is it really ethnography? Don’t know, don’t care.
Copyright 2009, Paul Bryan, Usography Corporation (http://www.usography.com)
Linked In: http://www.linkedin.com/in/uxexperts
Copyright 2009, Paul Bryan, Usography Corporation (http://www.usography.com)
Linked In: http://www.linkedin.com/in/uxexperts
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7. Field notes are coded and analyzed for themes and key variables, and are edited to communicate a perspective.
Ethnography typically results in a massive set of rich data, from which researchers extract meaning, and hopefully, a well-founded direction. They develop a coding schema to summarize what was learned across the entire dataset and draw connections, corroborations, and conclusions. In the business of design, ethnographic research findings should include not only design recommendations, but conceptual designs that can be supported by and traced to specific data.
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