INFO 272 Qualitative Research Methods DESIGN ETHNOGRAPHY Outline

INFO 272. Qualitative Research Methods DESIGN ETHNOGRAPHY

Outline Ethnography applied to design User-Centered Methods for Design Innovation and Evaluation Stories/Examples 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 Focus Groups Participant. Observation Interviews Contextual Inquiry Cultural Probes Design Evaluation 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

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)

Findings Priorities and work practice: Vineyard managers prefer to be in the vineyard not doing desk work or data analysis work Suggestions for sensor network configurations driven by work practice, not de-contextualized technical optimizations Need to delegate between automatic and human-initiated decisions about data appropriately

Presentation Modes

Ethnography Applied Beyond Observations = New Features The World Out There END RESULT Innovative New Product Users and Potential Users THE SITE The Ethnographer Development Team

Ethnography Applied Product Innovation and Requirements Gathering …But also… Business Processes, Strategic Planning Internal Organization of the Development Team (Work culture) Marketing Strategies

An Ecological View of Implications Business strategy New form factors Policy Users Marketing

Summary Decisions about ‘products’ happen at many levels Potential contribution of ethnographic approaches Improving how teams work to design things (studying designers/managers, not just the users) What ‘market’ or milieu to build something for What thing to build (high-level) What specific features to include or capabilities to facilitate – i. e. requirements gathering (low-level)

Lucy Suchman and the Legend of the ‘Green Button’