When is Ethnography worth the cost?
Ethnography fieldwork can be expensive. Part of the expense is due to the time it takes to get significant results, and the travel that is often required. Another expense factor is that ethnography studies require skilled, experienced people to guide the effort. In addition to cost considerations, the results of ethnographic research are sometimes difficult to translate directly into systems design.
Ethnography becomes relevant when design teams need to innovate, rather than incrementally improve an existing design. Ethnographic research is worth the cost when the success of a design is dependent upon being very different from current existing solutions, for example, a completely different way of supporting a real-life activity or exploring a new market opportunity that didn’t exist before.
“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” Henry Ford
“The future has already happened, it just isn’t very well distributed.” William Gibson
“The future will soon be a thing of the past.” George Carlin
Copyright 2010, Paul Bryan, Usography Corporation (http://www.usography.com)
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