Etnography - "get out of the building" and go where your problem/need really is

To validate your business idea first and foremost you need to "get out of the building" and go where the problem/need you want to solve/satisfy is.

When you examine people in context, synthesize their stories, and apply the results to solve a business or design problem you are conducting something people call ethnography, design research, user research, contextual inquiry, fieldwork, or whatever.

Ethnography can help investigate design or business challenges. A proper mindset (be it researcher/designer/entrepreneur) is essential when observing and/or interacting with target audiences (customers/users) in their real-life environment.

You need to develop a key skill for effective user observation: Empathy (ability to connect with others and yourself, being able to observe without judgment). The way to develop this higher awareness is through Mindfulness.

Mindfulness will be dealt with in later posts, but basically we want to remove our ego from the equation. You will see below how ego (that gives us a wrong view on reality and phenomena) impairs Empathy and Etnography, crucial in the first phases of Customer Development (see previous post).

Top 10 Ethnographic Research Videos

1. Introduction: Three videos that will give you a basic idea of what this type of research activity is, what it can help you with, and guidelines for conducting it.

#1 - What people are really doing: This is a 20-minute documentary, created by IIT Institute of Design students, which introduces some key concepts and approaches for effective user observation.

#2 - Getting people to talk: Another great primer from The IIT Institute of Design. Innovation starts with users’ needs and employs a set of reliable methods, theories, and tools to create solutions to their problems. Ethnography and interviewing are how designers see the world through other people’s eyes and get them to tell us their stories.This video focuses on how to get people to talk to you.

#3 - Interview with Victoria Bellotti (PARC): This is an interview held by Robert Scoble with Victoria Bellotti who manages PARC’s Socio-Technical and Interaction Research team. Victoria studies people to understand their practices, problems, and requirements for future technology, and also designs and analyzes human-centered systems.


2. Examples: The following brief videos provide excellent samples of what ethnographic research looks like.

#4 - Safety on the road: This video is one in a series of 4 videos targeted at learning about road safety for bicycle riders.

#5 - Reading ahead: What will reading look in the future? Will we be using printed books, rectangular electronic devices, embedded technologies? This competition challenged designers to envision a rich future digital reading experience, based on a defined set of design research.

#6 - Future of fish: The Central team discusses how they used ethnographic research to help apply design thinking to sustainable fishing.

3. Go deeper

#7 - Discover and Act on Insights about People by Steve Portigal: What do customers want or need? A permanent concern for entrepreneurs, designers, marketers and others seeking to innovate. Steve Portigal discusses methods for exploring both solutions and needs and he explores how an understanding of culture (yours and your customers’) can drive innovation.

#8 - Law and disorder in Lagos, Nigeria: According to Steve Portigal, some of the best user research techniques can be seen in great documentaries. This is one such documentary. It is fascinating to watch how Theroux stays open to people despite their weirdness, how he asks the questions that are really hard to ask, how he’s able to remove himself as an “ego” from the situation, and how he seems to genuinely like the people he meets.

#9 - The birth of a word, a TED talk by Deb Roy: MIT researcher Deb Roy wanted to understand how his infant son learned language — so he wired up his house with video cameras to catch every moment (with exceptions) of his son’s life, then parsed 90,000 hours of home video to watch “gaaaa” slowly turn into “water.” Astonishing, data-rich research with deep implications for how we learn. Quantitative ethnography at its best.

4. Fun: Confidential Google research on YouTube

 click here to see the videos

 

 

 

More on Steve Portigal (interview) - San Francisco, CA, USA
steve@portigal.com, www.portigal.com, www.cultureventure.net
Steve Portigal is the founder of Portigal Consulting, a boutique firm that brings together user research, design and business strategy to help innovative companies discover and act on new insights about their customers. He also leads CultureVenture, a group that provides immersive and inspirational experiences in foreign cultures to help executives, project managers, designers and others discover and make sense of the notable differences in other markets.