Design Ethnography

1
Design Ethnography

• INFO 272. Qualitative Research Methods
• 23 April 2009

2
Outline

• Critique by Dourish
• User-Centered Methods for Design Innovation and
  Evaluation
• Stories/Examples
• The Legend of the Green Button
• The Vineyard Project
• An Ecological View of Implications

3
(No Transcript)
4
Dourish critique

• Dimensions of the critique
• Marginalization of theory
• Power relations between disciplines
• Restricted model of the relationship between
  technology and practice
• Problems of representation and interaction

5
Dourish critique

• Implied that designers as gatekeepers but
  ethnographic approaches show that users are not,
  passive recipients of predefined technologies
  butactors who collectively create the
  circumstances, contexts, and consequences of
  technology use.

6
Design Innovation Design Evaluation
Focus Groups Participant-Observation Interviews Contextual Inquiry Cultural Probes Task analysis User testing Heuristic Evaluation Focus groups Eye-tracking
7
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

8
(By Contrast) Contextual Inquiry
Contextual Design, Beyer and Holtzblatt
9
Product Development, Marketing and Related
Business Processes
Requirements Gathering
Contextual Inquiry
Ethnographic Approaches
10
The Legend of the Green Button
11
Ethnography of a Usability Study

• How we select the site of ethnographic
  fieldwork is it located only in the world of
  the user or does it include the designers as
  well?
• Recall Woolgar on configuring the user
• Considering the broader institution within which
  user research takes place

12
The Vineyard Project
13
The Vineyard Project
14
The Vineyard Project

• 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?

15
The Vineyard Project

• Findings priorities 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

16
An Ecological View of Implications
Business strategy
Users
New form factors
Policy
Marketing
17
Summary

• Decisions about products happen at many levels
  (and ethnographic approaches can inform them
  all)
• Improving how teams work to design things
  (studying designers/managers, not just the users)
• What market to build something for
• What thing to build (high-level)
• What specific features to include or capabilities
  to facilitate i.e. requirements gathering
  (low-level)