Charles Frith emailed a question that he hoped I could address here

Is ethnography more suited to shedding light and depth on peoples relationships with some products or services over others? Are there times when it’s completely unnecessary?

That’s a two-parter! I’ll take a shot at this all, but I hope that others will jump in to clarify, correct, disagree, or whatever.

Are there times when ethnography is completely unnecessary?! Absolutely. But your second part is about time and your first part is about category. In terms of time, in terms of the process of developing a product or service, there are different types of research that may be more or less appropriate at different points along that process. There’s no overall answer, for me, it always depends.

For example, who is the organization? What do they know about the category, or the customer, or the channel, or the market, at this point? Is it a new product in a new category, or a redesign of something they’ve been doing before that they are improving? These are all facets of “what do you need to know more about?” I guess.

The best times to do any sort of customer research (and sorry if this is obvious) is when you can take some action with the results. If there are decisions to be made and they need informing by a user/customer perspective, then try to do that research ahead of time.

Depending on how you define ethnography, you may wish to see it only as a discovery process, as something that happens early on to define needs so that you can create solutions to match those needs. But putting solutions – prototypes – back into that conversation as a way to further validate the needs or dive deeper into them is a great way to go. You can read a case study of ours here that relates how an early prototype was taken into homes in order to have a more meaningful discussion about what the needs were and how this product could address those needs. You can always hold back your artifact for some portion of your session; that’s a standard technique we use.

As far as categories of products and services go, I don’t see that as a big dividing line in terms of the usefulness of research (and I’m speaking about research in general, whatever methodology you want to consider, some way of bringing customer perspectives into your design and decision process). I’d point again to the organization and its process as the crucial gating factors.

And

Also, are there precedents for ethnographic research in Asia?

Wow – two opportunities to cite DUX conference papers in one blog post. This PDF

uses research in Japan (conducted by us, and by Adobe, over several years) as a template for considering research in global locations.

I think there’s two flavors here: Global companies coming to Asia to understand these markets, and Asian companies doing for their own domestic markets something like ethnography. For the first, absolutely. Japan, China, and India have all been high-profile destinations for user research (and in case anyone wonders, we are very keen to go back and do some more). For the second, I hear more about India, specifically, with an increasing drive by Indian companies to understand how their products and services will be received. A colleague in India does a regular audit of teenager attitudes for MTV India. I don’t know in much more detail the market for this sort of thing in any part of Asia, only the different anecdotes I’ve collected from various Asian colleagues.

Should I also re-plug CultureVenture at this point? For companies looking to get a handle on these other markets, this is our service to drive inspiration through immersion. Facilitated hanging out, if you will?

How’s that Charles? I hope you’ll add some follow up questions in the comments.

Over the last year I was an advisor to the board of The Information Architecture Institute

. I’d never served a role like that before and I’m not an IA insider (to say the least) so there was a lot of interesting (and at times frustrating) uphill aspects to it. We worked out a huge amount of communication issues (i.e., what is our role as advisors, how do we communicate with each other, what does your organization do) and it felt like we made some good progress over the term. Ironically, it wasn’t until the last meeting of my term that I even found out that I had a term.

Frankly, it was a bit of an ego-soothing role. I’m an advisor! To the board! So to find out I was not in the gig for life was surprising, especially since that discovery happened only at the moment of termination. It was tied to the end of that board’s tenure and the pending elections of a new board. But the outgoing board (with some overlap with the incoming) polled us for interest in participating further. I said “yes” and that was all I heard until I see the IAI newsletter:

Finally, we’ve invited a superb group of Advisors to help out the Board this year ¬? I’ll let next month’s writer fill you in. I can say, though, that with Board and Advisors on four continents, we’re truly an international organization ¬? and the timing of our weekly conference calls is getting very tricky 🙂

Sigh. I did not make the cut, presumably. Back to being a civilian. Parting is such sweet sorrow?!

Update: 10/29 – received an official email thanking me for my involvement and letting me down easy regarding next year’s set of advisors. Spurred on by this entry, or coincidental? Nice to be thanked, but much classier to be informed personally, directly, ahead of time. Ironic that this is the third such incident in a couple of weeks where people could have done a much better job of telling me what the situation was before I heard it elsewhere. Oversights, usually, but something I’ll try myself to be conscious of.

I’ll be joining over 100 people at this event in SF on Friday. It could be mayhem, although I haven’t seen how large the space is, I’m figuring it’ll be pretty cramped. I’ll be part of a panel session; topics TBD, and I’m looking forward to the conversation and hanging out.

The Sheriff Dept is (.)(.)U! You need Help!!!

Seen on a walk in our neighborhood in Montara. We have no idea what this is about. Another small town mystery!

One of the interesting things about having a small business is the flexibility in how we can work. Our business model is based around a certain type of engagement: typically 6 to 8 weeks of half to 3/4 time, working directly with medium to large number-sized client team. But many other things come up (i.e., two of our last few projects involved direct collaboration with another agency, who had the original client relationship). Sometimes these different ways of working don’t work out, sometimes they are non-starters (like the call I returned a few weeks ago in which my guy had to wrap up the call to claim his court time; had an idea for a new company “but we’re not doing it for money”, and despite my clarity that this wasn’t a fit, was told I would be hearing from the partner, who of course didn’t follow through), but overall, I like the possibility that others can construct (or suggest) scenarios beyond what I may have thought of.

Recently I had a fun and simple gig; spend a day with a team, helping them to synthesize some data; pulling out some key themes and putting some text to it. There was no proposal, no deliverable, it was just a day of thinking, talking, synthesizing, organizing, writing.

Of course, we’re all hoping that it turns into more, either more like that, or more bigger, but as a first step, it was pretty fun. Variety is one of the key benefits of working in a consultancy, and varying the structure of the engagement is one source that I am always learning more about.

A recent BayCHI panel on Designing systems with emergent behavior featured Tim Brown (IDEO), Peter Merholz (Adaptive Path), Larry Cornett (Yahoo), and Joy Mountford (Yahoo), and was moderated by Rashmi Sinha.

My notes are up on Core77

Tim: Contrast that with physical design where you have more chances to test prototypes, with rapidly changing software, it’s too easy to do something new. Seems like a new feature got launched before a design process happened. Maybe they didn’t get to test it a little bit. Not referring to Beta, in videogames they are always testing all the time. It’s part of the design process. He prefers that to the classic Alpha Beta approach

Interesting methodology (and findings) for understanding the factors that influence our eating behaviors at the Food and Brand Lab at Cornell

In an eight-seat lab designed to look like a cozy kitchen, Dr. Wansink offers free lunches in exchange for hard data. He opened the lab at Cornell in April, after he moved it from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he spent eight years conducting experiments in cafeterias, grocery stores and movie theaters.
…
Although people think they make 15 food decisions a day on average, his research shows the number is well over 200. Some are obvious, some are subtle. The bigger the plate, the larger the spoon, the deeper the bag, the more we eat. But sometimes we decide how much to eat based on how much the person next to us is eating, sometimes moderating our intake by more than 20 percent up or down to match our dining companion.
…
Moviegoers in a Chicago suburb were given free stale popcorn, some in medium-size buckets, some in large buckets. What was left in the buckets was weighed at the end of the movie. The people with larger buckets ate 53 percent more than people with smaller buckets. And people didn’t eat the popcorn because they liked it, he said. They were driven by hidden persuaders: the distraction of the movie, the sound of other people eating popcorn and the Pavlovian popcorn trigger that is activated when we step into a movie theater.

Dr. Wansink is particularly proud of his bottomless soup bowl, which he and some undergraduates devised with insulated tubing, plastic dinnerware and a pot of hot tomato soup rigged to keep the bowl about half full. The idea was to test which would make people stop eating: visual cues, or a feeling of fullness.

People using normal soup bowls ate about nine ounces. The typical bottomless soup bowl diner ate 15 ounces. Some of those ate more than a quart, and didn’t stop until the 20-minute experiment was over. When asked to estimate how many calories they had consumed, both groups thought they had eaten about the same amount, and 113 fewer calories on average than they actually had.

A sidebar listing other experiments and results is here (link may expire).

Taken from this list

18. Dice Inspector
What they do: Inspect dice used in casinos for lopsided angles, misspotting and other blemishes that could cause error when the dice are rolled for gambling purposes.

19. Ethnographer
What they do: Research and study single groups of human behavior through fieldwork, observing and questioning participants.

20. Gum Buster
What they do: Remove gum stuck to sidewalks, street benches and other unwanted areas by de-sticking the gum through a steaming process.

[Thanks, JZC]

The door at the Montara post office is held open with materials on hand – the plastic dispensers from the rolls of packing tape they sell.

Quote from Learning from Las Vegas

A driver 30 years ago [written in 1977] could maintain a sense of orientation in space. At the simple crossroad a little sign with an arrow confirmed what was obvious. One knew where one was. When the crossroads becomes a cloverleaf, one must turn right to left…But the driver has no time to ponder paradoxical subtleties within a dangerous, sinuous maze. He or she relies on signs for guidance – enormous signs in vast spaces at high speeds.