Ethnography
Ethnography is a method used to capture information about behaviour in the context of people’s real world environments. It can be used to obtain unarticulated needs, motivations, and drivers to develop innovative designs.
Ethnography is an effective user research method because it gives insights into the elements that constitute an overall customer experience. It is also useful in helping to map and explain the relationships between the elements of the whole customer experience.
When to use: Ethnograhphy is an effective method used at the beginning of a project. The essence of ethnography is that it makes no assumptions about research findings and is a purely exploratory exercise. Foviance can apply a number of ethnographic techniques and methodologies.
1. Critical incident technique
What it is: Critical incident technique can be used for collecting direct observations of human behaviour that have a significant contribution to the outcome of an activity or experience, whether positive or negative. Each observation is called a critical incident.
Critical incidents can be gathered in various ways, but people are typically asked to identify specific incidents which they experienced personally and which had an important effect on the final outcome. The emphasis is on incidents rather than vague opinions.
When to use: Critical incident technique is typically used fairly early on in the design cycle in order to identify the key touch points that impact the overall experience.
2. Diary Studies
What it is: Diary studies is a technique for recording experiences of users about what they did, how they did it and what they thought about their overall experience of using a particular system or product. The data which comes out of a diary study can help to challenge designers’ assumptions about a system or product or highlight particular ‘sticking’ points in the overall customer experience.
A diary typically includes the recording of the date and time of an event, location, information about the event of significance, and satisfaction ratings etc.
When to use: Diary studies can be a useful method to gather data at any stage of the development cycle for a system or product and in a wide variety of contexts, for example, to gather data for comparative analysis across different demographics or to highlight cross-cultural differences in international contexts.
3. Contextual inquiry
What it is: Contextual inquiry is a customer-centred design methodology to gather detailed data through the observation and one-to one interviews with users to understand the context in which a system or product is used.
The overall goal is to understand how and why something is done. Foviance works in partnership with the user to discover how a product or website can be improved within the context of use.
When to use: Contextual enquiry is best suited when there is a need to understand the users’ work context or when defining a customer experience particularly in the early stages of system or product development.
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