Ethnography for design

— Published July 3rd, 2009  |  by Clodagh Kelly

At this year's Boot Camp FutureNow session, John regaled us with his excellent talk on design thinking/ and how it can (and should) be applied to solve all kinds of problems. One of the key features of design thinking is "observing real life to see things from the customers' perspective".

True enough. But to design really great experiences, products, or services, it is about more than just observing what people do; it is about participating in their world.

As Matt Webb says on his blog, "It has to be realised that experience is very badly understood by observation: the designer has to take part. Nothing is easier than believing we understand experiences we've never had."

When you wear your intended audience's shoes, fully participate in their world and experience what they do, it is possible to glean insights and develop a sense of empathy that is otherwise unattainable.

This is design ethnography.

The tools of the trade

As user experience designers, we have many tools at our disposal. But it's important to choose the right tool for the task at hand.

To gather requirements and find out what's wrong with an existing design, we test users and interview customers. It's invaluable. However, user testing has shown us that users rarely do what they say they do, and that people often don't actually know what products, services or features they really want or need. As the oft' quoted Henry Ford said "If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse."

Photo: Ethan Lebovox (flickr)

Design ethnography doesn't just focus on the product. A design ethnographer focuses on people and the activities in which they engage. So, rather than building a product that people say they want (Henry Ford's horse), or that you imagine they might want, design ethnography allows us to determine the right product to build in the first place (the car).

Some background on ethnography

Ethnography in its traditional sense has been around for a very long time; it is a branch of anthropology that looks at people's behaviour within natural environments to determine how people live their lives.
Ethnographers study their subjects through 'participant observation' - where they immerse themselves in the lives of their participants and record in detail their observations, thoughts and experiences.

As user experience designers with clients - and therefore project plans and budgets - we don't have the luxury of long timelines, nor can we produce the same highly detailed reports that an ethnographer typically produces.

But all hope is not lost.

We can employ some of the techniques ethnography uses in order to gain a deeper understanding of un-met and unarticulated needs. And, it can be done quickly and yield incredibly useful results.

Design ethnography in action

Recently, two of our iCubers, Belen Barros and Conor O'Sullivan, worked on a project to develop a new self-service system for a client.

As part of the initial planning for the product, they undertook a short ethnographic study in the client's call centre. They spent one and a half days planning the study, two days conducting the study, and several days analysing the outputs.

In the call centre, they shadowed 6 call centre agents for 2 days - they listened to calls, interviewed them, and ran a workshop with them. Calls and interviews were recorded on iPhones and later transcribed and analysed. Simple, but effective.

The goal of the study was to understand, in the customer's terms, what problems they had, the severity of the problems, identify areas of frustration and confusion and learn the terminology both customers and agents use.

Although the study was short, the findings were invaluable, and would not have been attainable without participation in the customers' world.

They were able to gain an understanding of a customer's mental model of the service: where the pain points were (and more rarely the joy points!), how the processes worked from the customers' point of view - what they found easy, and where difficulties arose.

They used the findings of that study to plan the new product; to generate insight for design and prioritise new functionality.

"Is it really ethnography?"... and other controversies

A bit of controversy surrounds the design community's adoption of ethnography. Specifically, the use of its methods for design, the validity of the approach and, of course, what it should be called.

While I understand these concerns, I don't think they are a cause for worry. As long as a study is well planned with clear goals, undertaken by experienced researchers and the output is carefully analysed; the methods and validity of the research will stand up.

For me, what it's called is irrelevant; design ethnography, field research, commercial ethnography, design research - we can apply any of these.

The key is that the goal is not to "do Ethnography" but to gain a deeper understanding of your target audience, by participating in their world. It's not product research, market research or customer research; rather, it's people research.

My advice to you? Don't spend days talking to product managers and CEOs about what they think they should design for their audience, don't even ask your customers what they think they might want.

Get out there and immerse yourself in your customer's world - and then you'll have a chance of designing the car instead of the faster horse.