The Role of Ethnography

By Amanda Roach and Catherine Fox

Ethnography is a research technique used to inform intuitive design by capturing information about people’s behaviour in the context of their own environments. It is proven to be an effective method of gaining accurate insights into customer experience and is particularly effective method at the beginning of a project when no assumptions have been made about potential findings.

At Foviance we like to think that ethnography allows us to walk in our customers’ shoes, not just observing what they do, but also what they don’t do, and what they don’t realise they are doing. In a business environment, for example, many people perform numerous physical and social actions during the day that are not strictly defined by their working role. Individuals develop workarounds, they work with colleagues on problematic tasks, and even establish consensual best practices for dealing with certain issues – all often without realising what they are really doing. Indeed if you actually ask people to describe what they do during an average working day, they’ll only think to tell you of around 20 percent of their activities.

Ethnography is most commonly associated with immersive observation, but can be employed to great effect at all stages of the customer experience cycle. It can be used to discover the ways by which people reach purchasing decisions, how they browse in shops, how they flick through catalogues, how they deal with the out-of-box experience of a new product, how they interact with different interfaces, how they handle glitches or problems, and of course the journeys they take through websites. Technology enables us to look at the totality of the user experience, joining up observations and arguably moving beyond the Margaret Mead approach to anthropology and sociology, by adding engaged interaction to more passive observation.

We’ve used ethnography worldwide to measure experiences for global brands in a variety of regions. One ethnographic project saw us working for a major computer retailer in China. The company did not want to make assumptions about the work environments of people employed in both small and large businesses. We entered these environments and measured dimensions in their workspace, observed working conditions, examined how individual workers set up their workstations, evaluated noise levels, noted the locations of windows, measured co-worker interaction and more.

However, we have also been tasked with measuring individual learning curves with new mobile phone handsets, and have achieved this somewhat differently by allowing participants to use the phones in a natural way in their own environments, keeping a diary of experiences for further discussion. We were even able to ask individuals to take photos with their handsets at different times during their day to record their environment and experiences, enhancing the verbal analysis with a visual record and a real sense of the mobile experience.

These ‘digital ethnography’ techniques have to some extent allowed us to combat the ‘Hawthorne effect’, a studied reaction that can cause subjects to alter their measurable behaviours simply because they are being observed. The closer we can get to allowing participants in research to evaluate products and services in their own real-world environment, the more likely we can avoid such problems. Even sending consultants into working environments can prove problematic, with employees worrying that their bosses might be critical, for example, of their workarounds. In this sense, the role of the ethnographer is to disappear into woodwork, to attempt to put people at ease, and to use probing questions.

Sometimes we get to go to people’s homes and see for ourselves how they grab time to use the services we are evaluating between their chores and home life. It can be a real eye-opener and provides powerful insights for clients looking to develop their services to fit better into their customers’ real lives.

Ethnography is a broad discipline. The most appropriate applications of ethnography must be used in the right circumstances, and more often than not they will also be used in conjunction with other methodologies such as lab-based testing and user groups. Often we will observe a working structure or a product being used and simply report. But other projects may be highly contextual – for example we have discovered keyboards that were regarded highly in a laboratory environment but were too reflective to use outside in bright sunlight!

This is why we try to put realism into the experience, so we can feel and see potential end customer pain points – these are real people in real contexts.