The rise of the ethnographers

In the 90s, the webdesign team comprised a designer, responsible for the look and feel, and a developer, who did the coding behind the scenes. Who was thinking of the end user? Theoretically both of them were, but it was nobody’s job. Designers often created wacky interfaces to express their personalities and (somewhat optimistically) expected users to persevere and learn how they worked. The coders tended to have a technical background, and sometimes considered a user interface that is bug-free to be working and users who couldn’t operate it to be stupid. When the team did consider what users needed, it was based on intuition rather than research.

The creative team of the future will also include somebody who takes responsibility for the user experience. The ethnographer is there to empathise with users and ensure that the finished website meets their needs easily. The best way to do that is to watch users in their natural surroundings. It’s like watching wildlife. If you study pandas at the zoo, you’re observing the zoo as much as the bears.

We recently undertook a project for Royal Mail, which wanted to optimise its online postage services for small businesses. Rather than inviting people in to talk to us or sit in the lab, we visited small businesses and shadowed them as they processed their post. We could ask them questions as they were working, and find out what inspired them to use particular carriers. Our subjects also kept diaries which we used to quiz them later.

Usability testing is an ideal tool when subjects can easily articulate their needs, or when an interface is already available for testing. But ethnographic research is essential to find out how people use a service, including those parts that are not online, or to learn more about the users’ needs when they are hard to generalise and explain.

While visionary companies employ ethnographers and usability specialists today, in future, they will be a part of every successful design team.