INFO 272. Qualitative Research Methods
Feb 25, 2016
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)