Ethnography

The holy grail of maximizing return on investment in UX is to understand customer value. Engineering teams often define MVP based on an internally focused set of priorities. Marketing and business teams often use market research to focus group customer perceptions. Both of these approaches miss a major innovation in UX methodology. 

If you dissect UX, it has two sides: “Ease of use” vs. “Do I even want your feature?”. Most teams chase ease of use, because it seems to be the goal of reducing complexity, and it is. However, desirability or, “Are you solving core customer problems?” is more important. 

In this webinar we will learn how to ground your UX efforts with a Desirability First approach. We will see how this essential aspect of your UX/UI process is critical to business and design innovation. We will discuss this single most important element of your UX strategy and how to bring tangible business value to your UX efforts from user research. 

Summary: Diary Studies are one of the most under-utilized and least understood UX techniques. Diary Studies are slightly more complicated than user testing and require additional know-how in study design, moderation and deployment. In this webinar and complimentary e-book, you'll learn how to use diary studies like a pro, avoiding the pitfalls inherent in diary studies.

Why Diary Studies?

Summary: 'User research' has become a catch-all phrase to mean user testing in many organizations. User research has two main activities: usability testing and field studies. Defining your design research with only a validation exercise (testing) misses the essential discovery of user needs, pain points and desires that Ethnographic Field Studies provide. User research should always mean more than just user testing!

How are you defining user research?

Many organizations we work with and UX designers we provide training for, tell us they do 'user research'. Once we dig deeper, we find they are defining user research as user testing. This means only half of UX insights are actually making it to your team.  

The two main types of user research your team needs access to:

Ethnography is a technique developed largely by anthropologist Margaret Mead. It involves behavioral observation, contextual interviewing and analysis of users in their work, home or play spaces. The key strength to ethnography is context. Context provides insight into not only who users are (demographics) but what is important to them and what causes them to act and make decisions (psychographics). 

Ethnography goes by a few different names. The most common include: Contextual Interviewing, Field Studies and Task Analysis.  My personal contribution to the field, called "Cognitive Archeology"(PDF) involves an analysis of user behavior and environment with an emphasis on understanding decision-making, problem-solving and the interaction of tasks, values and beliefs.