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
Sebastian Chan on Museums for the Next Generation
The Powerhouse Museum and the in-house digital agency Chan has been heading within it have liberated the collection and extended the museum experience beyond exhibitions and museum walls. Sebastian Chan is head of Digital, Social and Emerging Technologies at the Powerhouse Museum, Sydney. I first saw him talk at Web Directions in 2007. Then he case studied social tagging projects and it was great to here how the initiatives have grown.
Amongst the strategies, tools and technologies discussed on the night were:
- Open APIs to enable sharing of collection data
- Geo coded images enabling data mash-ups of historical photos
- Social tagging enabling richer descriptions of collection items
- Keyword search tags enabling ‘frictionless tagging’ and driving improvements in how items are catalogued by examining how people describe them
- Online exhibitions (such as the Australian Dress Register) encouraging learning and cataloguing amongst smaller collectors
There’s efficiency and there’s experience. Last month I published an article for UX Mag on the subject of customer efficiency. It opens with a story about the Melbourne trams. It’s conductors were replaced by machines in an efficiency drive. However the efficiency of customers and of the service required consideration around tasks beyond ticket purchase. Conductors served a multitude of customer needs but in the narrow assessment of their use they were deemed redundant.
Tram conductor - Illustration by Nam Nguyen
A reader of the article, Lisa Chow, cited an example from her own professional experience as a library consultant in the comments. A system to check out books replaced librarians doing the task but the self service model wasn’t necessarily efficient for users trying to achieve multiple tasks in the act of borrowing a book–like querying outstanding fines.
Having worked for a company behind open source software, I know how important community conduct is, on forums and other channels. In fact it was something that Geoff, as FarCry product evangelist had to (and I’m sure still does) moderate closely. This interaction between products and users is vital in fostering closer relationships between companies and customers, feature improvements and product innovation.
So it is great to see Get Satisfaction create a campaign around this. Get Satisfaction is a service that allows customers to send feedback, bugs and feature requests to companies. They have created a campaign called the Company Customer Pact. An accord, or code of conduct if you will. As interactions between companies and customers get closer through social media it will become more and more important that people are on the same page. Check it out, and get on board.
http://www.ccpact.com/
I recently finished a project where I conducted user testing to validate the effectiveness of a navigation menu. The project was a collaboration with the client’s project team who were responsible for the prototype and the recruitment. Everyone was confident going in to the user testing on the IA scheme but were open to changes. This may seem a mute point—why do testing if you are not going to change anything? Strangely I have seen people be highly selective of what they wanted to have proven in testing. Luckily this project featured no such hubris and everyone was respectful of the problems encountered by the users.
Elsewhere in the organisation other stakeholders held competing and contrasting views of what needed to be designed in the schema and what labels needed to be used. User testing the IA was seen as a means to streamline and manage the internal decision making process by bringing everyone together on the same page and letting users themselves determine the outcome.
Usability war stories hit the news twice yesterday. The first report detailed a software project gone bad in NSW hospital emergency departments. Its worth reading for its examples of non-existent user research practices, and the clear failing to gather the requirements and define the business rules specific to the audience and environment the software was designed to operate in. One can only assume there was no quality assurance testing to boot.
The project … had proceeded too fast – apparently because of contractual obligations – for clinicians’ feedback to influence it, Dr McCarthy said.
…
FirstNet, commissioned in 2008 from the US health computing giant Cerner in Missouri, insisted on redundant information, such as confirmation that male patients were not pregnant, Professor Patrick found. But it obscured essential information, forcing users to click through six screens to find the phone number of a patient’s GP. Excessive system downtime led one department to revert to a whiteboard to ensure basic patient information was accessible.
Oh the shame! Check out my wall.
Facebook wall populated/polluted with Branchout status updates
See all those horrible, horrible application status messages. I like to think of myself as pretty web savvy but I lost some serious web cred today when I inadvertantly spammed countless friends.
How I became a web idiot
After returning from a workshop I was feeling pretty tired and looking for any semi legitimate opportunity to avoid actual work. Then I got a Facebook message from Ahmed my workmate. OK it was a Facebook message – but he’s a colleague, so its kinda work related, right? I could be missing an office meme here! OK. Click.
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