Ethnography for UX Researchers
Surveys, questionnaires, or lab studies are great research methods, but UX researchers can miss significant opportunities if they don’t add ethnographic research in their toolkit. In UXR world, ethnographic research is often referred to as Field Study.
Key benefits of Ethnography in UXR
Respondents are interacting with the design in the environment that they know. The UX Researcher can observe and understand the behavior of respondents and their interactions with the design on the scene/in context, which gives them authentic insight.
Authentic reactions and opinions unveils many important aspects of the complex reality and are the main advantages of ethnographic research.
“You can’t reinvent from your office; you have to go be with the people and see what they are doing, and feel what they are doing, and how they are living and what their needs are” — Will Smith at #ibminterconnect 2017
When to conduct Ethnographic Research:
Ethnographic research makes sense not only before and during the planning phase of software development lifecycle but also during production. Ethnographic Research can be leveraged to learn if your intentions are understood and used in a way you planned?
- When looking for new business opportunities: What do people need? Are there gaps in people’s experiences today where you can position a product for? How are people using competitor products that are aiming at providing value within the same strategic area?
- Beginning of the product’s life cycle: Does the product fit users’ needs? Does the value proposition make sense to users?
- Observation of users when using your product in context: When, where and how are people using it, and how it is changing their previous behaviors or sentiment.
Types of ethnographic research I have used throughout my career as a UX researcher
Below, I will explain what each one of these types of research are and give you some specific examples.
- Passive observation:
Passive observation means that the researchers are following a subject but without any active interaction. (in a non-creepy way and always after asking for consent.)
For example: When exploring opportunities to accelerate discovery of new materials, I decided to visit polymer and battery labs and observe material scientists conduct experiments without engaging with them as the first phase of my study.
2. Active observation:
Researcher becomes an active member of the group/activity being observed and interacting with the research subjects.
There are 2 types of active participant observation: disguised and undisguised. In the former, researcher pretends to be a part of the research subjects activity or experience while hiding his or her identity of being a researcher.
Example: When I had to understand what the experience of taking a WAV (wheelchair-accessible vehicle) “lyft” ride looks like for both wheelchair user and driver, I had to disguise my identity as a researcher and pretend to be a wheelchair user who hailed a ride.
Note: there are a lot of ethical matters that you need to be taking into consideration before you choose the disguised active observation as your preferred method for answering specific research questions. Always assess the benefit vs harm balance and ask yourself: “ Is there a better, less harmful way to answer these questions?”3. Contextual inquiry (Interviews): In this type of research, Researchers can both observe and ask questions to understand the interactions of respondents and their immediate intentions and thoughts.
Example 1: When I was trying to gain more insight into how Computational Chemists run experiments and analyze their data and collaborate with experimentalist chemists, I visited them in their labs and conducted some observation as well as a semi structured interview.
Example 2: when I wanted to learn more about a Self Driving Taxi Service riders experience with the autonomous vehicle, I went on ride alongs on their routine trips and not only observed them use the service but also engaged in a conversation to learn more about their experience and decision making process.
4. Virtual Ethnography
Virtual ethnography (netnography) is a research approach for exploring the social interactions that take place in virtual environments. These interactions often take place on the internet in sites such as newsgroups, chats and forums.
Example: as a part of my master’s thesis, I identified several forums that were dedicated to people with diverse abilities, specific for those who were wheelchair users. I observed their conversations and interactions and sometimes even engaged with them as well.
Note: Virtual ethnography does not refer to using online tools to conduct remote ethnographic research.5. Longitudinal Ethnographic Study
In a longitudinal studies are normally immersive ethnographic fieldwork conducted over an extended period of time.
Researchers repeatedly examine the same individuals (Revisits) to detect any changes that might occur over a period of time.
Example: Below is an example of how I designed a 4 month long longitudinal study with teenage users of a Self Driving Taxi service:
Doing Ethnography Remotely
Contrary to expectations, remote ethnography is not only possible but also presents new affordances (fewer budget, space and time constraints).
The secret sauce of doing ethnographic research is that sometimes your participants will forget you are doing research and there are ways to achieve achieve that with remote encounters.
Some remote ethnography methods are: Web interviews, WhatsApp Message interviews, diaries, online behavior observation, etc.
Tips And Tricks for Remote Ethnographic Research
I’d like to share some of the tips and tricks that I employ in my work to conduct quality remote ethnographic studies
1- Meet people in their context, remotely
Integrating into people’s lives (embedded research) over a longer period of time can afford UX researchers the opportunity for more organic observation and participation.
Consider the contexts that will be most relevant and the tools that will allow the most spontaneous exploration.
- Diary Studies
- Video Shadowing (Desktop screen sharing)
- Video Calls (on phone)
- Multimedia messaging apps (WhatsApp)
- Remote Video Observation
2- Repeat engagements
We can design approaches that allow for multiple engagements with the participants across a longer duration (longitudinal remote ethnography) OR Recruit the same group of users for several different studies but designate a specific amount of time in the beginning to follow up on their previous conversations with you as a part of an effort to build rapport, this will help you gradually become the subject matter expert in your target users current experiences, makes your research artifacts timeless and will help you become a valuable partner for your stakeholders/team.
Integrating into people’s lives over a longer period of time or Interacting with participants over several occasions paints a more nuanced picture of their attitudes and behaviors affording opportunities for building rapport, capturing more authentic reactions and more organic observation and participation.
Note: if you repeat engagements for tactical or strategic product work, you do run the risk of making some key product decisions based on the opinion of a small group of people, so be sure to mix and match new and repeated engagements in each study.For example, I have a list of SME participants I have recruited from Linkedin with the intention to repeat my engagements with them to gain a deeper understanding of their world; However, I always recruit new participants through Respondent.io or Userinerviewes.com to make sure I add diversity of opinion and avoid introducing bias to my data.
3- Build Rapport “remotely”
In some ways remote research ( the adjustment from host/guest to participant/researcher) has allowed me to develop rapport better and quicker than in person research.
Afterall, There is no initial awkwardness at the front door, working out whether to keep my shoes on or off or figuring out how to sit on the participants bare floor (and then successfully stand up) while 8 months pregnant because the participant owned no furniture or acting normal while figuring out how to find a safe path to the dining table while navigating the spaces between hoarded items in someone's house, or fearing for my life while walking into a house with 250 swords hung on every wall or trying not to get a heat stroke in a participants house with broken AC in the middle of Arizona summer.… and worst of all… trying to act normal and focus all while participants dogs attacked me, or just licked the hell out of me and chewed my equipment (I do miss all the cat cuddles though).
Note: Don’t get me wrong, there are many benefits to in person ethnography, for example: in person ethnography gives you access to cultural and contextual artifacts and richer observations. I have also noticed that during in person ethnographic research sessions, participants are willing to tell you more, give you more and share deeper emotions when you are in their space.I typically use 2 methods to build rapport with my remote participants:
Relational (A connection with the researcher)
- Identity: Participants want to see your identity (Social media presence etc) so make sure to have a active social media presence such as on linkedIn
- Vulnerabilities: Participants want to see your vulnerabilities (don’t try to be too perfect…or too formal, it’s okay to have a little sense of humor or show your imperfections)
- Knowledge: They want to see what you know about the particular context. do your homework to learn their language. For example, when I am doing research with cloud security SMEs, I take the initiative to self educate extensively so that I can easily communicate with them and understand their “language”.
Contextual/Sense of community
- Creating the context: Bringing participants into a research platform such as mytake.com where you can create communities and conduct ongoing studies. This also gives participants and opportunity to interact with likeminded people and start their own discussion forums on the relevant topic which is not only beneficial to your research but also to them.
- Finding the context: Approaching participants in a context they are a part of such as online discussion forums. This is what I did for my thesis study and I continue to do in my career as a UX researcher. I have even gone as far as partnering with Youtube influencers (who created content relevant to a particular topic) and recruited their viewers into my studies.
4. Use exercises and activities to go wider and deeper
The remote research field of observation is narrow, causing information loss. It requires additional efforts (such as exercises and activities) to engineer the production of meaningful insights.
Majority of in person activities I have done in the past, can be carried out remotely using tools such as Miro or Mural. These activities will help you produce artifacts to make your research more tangible.
Some types of activities you can do:
- Exploring the social dimension (draw relationship trees, org charts, etc.)
- Exploring the spatial dimension (draw maps of a neighborhood or of the home arrangement)
- Mapping Experiences (co-creating Journey maps or experience maps)
- Co-design/Co-create (Brainstorm and iterate on ideas with the participant using pre defined templates etc.)
Example#1: I recently used Mural to conduct journey mapping with software engineers and their central IT counterparts in highly regulated enterprises, to map out their experience with greenfield application development lifecycle in order to understand their current workflow, tools, pain points, touchpoints, handoffs, and uncover opportunity areas for IBM to offer meaningful and helpful experiences for hands on users of our products and services.
Example#2: I recently used Keynote to co create various versions of an IT department Org Chart with several Central IT engineers to understand various roles and responsibilities of each user type
5. Don’t be extractive
This applies to both in person or remote studies. People are not soil samples that you can extract information from.
- Read between the lines of what they say.
- Explore relationships, spaces, etc. There are things within the context that has not taken full discursive form and can not be articulated in form of words
- Mine cultural products and other found material (The holy grail)
Conclusion
People have blind spots when it comes to describing their own behavior or describing the why behind their actions or decisions.
This is exactly why ethnography is used as a research method in the field of UX Research. It brings researchers into the “field,” to observe people in their natural environments in order to understand their needs.
With ethnography, you watch the chaos that is human behavior, to uncover the “hidden obvious” — Ellen Isaacs
Conducting remote ethnographic research is not only possible but also carries numerous benefits and implications for the methods, conduct, ethics and reporting.
I’d like to hear your experiences with conducting in person or remote ethnographic research. you can use the comments section to share your stories, tips and tricks.
