eri on the interweb

Ethnography for Marketers -- A guide to consumer immersion

Ethnography for Marketers was recommended to me in 2007, I finally got round to reading it in 2010 and the other day I revisited the copious notes I took. This is a book about ethnography, research, projects and design. But why write a blog post that is a book review? Particular when the subject is essentially a text book?

As the title suggests this is a book targeted at marketers not designers but don’t let that put you off. This is a text book for user centred design that anyone who describes themselves in anyway “UX” should read. This is also a text that anyone managing UX projects should read.

Not only does the book provide a framework to conducting observational qualitative research – it goes into the detail of how to conduct that research:

• Recruiting for respondents

back row snap of the event

I first saw Sebastian Chan speak at Web Direction on 2007. He presented on social tagging (“folksonomy”) projects at the Powerhouse museum. The first of these projects was the digitisation of electronic fabric swatches. After that the entire collection was digitised and published available for public classification. Recently I saw him present and got an update on these projects.

When I first saw this case study presented in 2007 the stats amazed me:

• 95% of all available objects were visited at least once in the first 10 weeks of the collection being published online
• 86% of tags created by users were not found in museum (curatorial) descriptions
• 88% of tags were assessed as useful by museum staff

This blog post is about diary studies and how to go about conducting them.

What are diary studies?

Diary studies, otherwise known as User Research Diaries or “Cultural probes” were pioneered for use in design research by William “Bill” Gaver, Professor at Goldsmiths London. Interestingly he doesn’t analyse diary content, nor does he create scenarios or personas from them instead using them as a base from which to validate other data. He does not create personas, preferring instead to revisit the raw data.

What are diary studies good for?

Thanks to Bec for introducing me to Mappiness and this video. Should be interesting for anyone who has run a diary studies project.

Matt Hogdson, awsome conference speaker, and writer of things IA and UX, and agile posted a blog about UCD. Intrigued I asked a question in the comments, and got a whole blog post as a response on getting stakeholders and users together in a workshop for co-design magic! Wow!

It’s a good read to boot. If you haven’t been so inclined as to click on any of the other links referenced thus far check it out: http://magia3e.wordpress.com/2011/02/21/ucd-is-getting-users-and-stakeholders-together/

I came across this video today made in 2008 by students from the IIT Institute of Design. It introduces design research and contextual inquiry and demonstrates what not to do when interviewing people. If your keen for tips on what makes or breaks a research session, its well worth watching.