Design Ethnography

INFO 272. Qualitative Research Methods

Outline Ethnography applied to design

User-Centered Methods for Design Innovation and Evaluation

Stories/ExamplesThe Legend of the ‘Green Button’The Vineyard Project

An Ecological View of Implications

What an Ethnographic Approach Offers to Product/Technology Design Getting a handle on ever more diverse user

populations (emic approach) Design Innovation (discovery process

through inductive analysis) Grounding feature prioritization exercises

(situated in the real-world context of use…beyond the focus group)

Blomberg et al 2003

Design Innovation

Design Evaluation

Focus Groups Participant-

Observation Interviews Contextual

Inquiry Cultural Probes

Task analysis User testing Heuristic

Evaluation Focus groups Eye-tracking

Ethnography – characterized by…subject: the holistic study of people,

culture, societies, social relations, social processes, behaviour in situ

method: some component of participant-observation

analysis and writing style: inductive analysis, use of ‘thick description’ and narrative, emic accounts

Contextual Inquiry (e.g.)

[Contextual Design, Beyer and Holtzblatt]

Examples

Lucy Suchman and the Legend of the ‘Green Button’

The Vineyard Project

Research Questions What data should we

gather and how often? What level of

computational interpretation should we apply to the data?

How should we present the data to users?

The Vineyard Project Participant-observation

and interviews Implementation work

(collecting data with sensor network motes in the vineyard)

FindingsPriorities and work practice: Vineyard managers prefer to be in the

vineyard not doing desk work or data analysis work

Suggested some sensor network configurations driven by work practice, not technical optimizations

Distribute automatic and human-initiated decisions about data appropriately

Presentation Modes

DevelopmentTeam

Ethnography Applied

Users and Potential Users

The World Out There

The Ethnographer

Innovative New Product

Beyond Observations = New Features

Product Innovation and Requirements Gathering

…But also…

Business Processes, Strategic Planning Internal Organization of the Development

Team (Work culture) Marketing Strategies

Ethnography Applied

An Ecological View of Implications

Policy Marketing

Users

Business strategy

New form factors

Summary Decisions about ‘products’ happen at many

levels Potential contribution of ethnographic

approachesImproving how teams work to design things (studying

designers/managers, not just the users)What ‘market’ to build something forWhat thing to build (high-level)What specific features to include or capabilities to

facilitate – i.e. requirements gathering (low-level)