Ethnography: understanding use where it happens
In the field, we watch use while it is happening.
Field observation sets out to understand users' activity in real conditions of use, in their actual environment. A questionnaire tells you what people do, while putting things back in context explores the motivations behind those behaviours. We travel out, we observe against a grid set in advance, and we report what we saw.
When the field is called for
When decontextualised methods stop being enough. For instance:
- Understanding why a business tool gets worked around although it covers the stated need.
- Grasping the experience of a service used over a long period, day after day.
- Exploring the motivations behind behaviours no questionnaire accounts for.
- Discovering the constraints of a working environment before designing anything for it.
The problem
Individual and group interviews give back the memory of use, reconstructed after the fact. Putting things back in context gives access to the activity itself, with its workarounds and its interruptions. The two families of methods complement each other, and the field brings in what decontextualised methods leave out of frame.
How we work
Draw up an observation grid
We define in advance what we are going to look at. The grid makes observation comparable from one site to the next, and it guides the collection of the salient elements once we are there.
Go into the field
We travel out to meet users and bring out their needs and expectations. Depending on the context, we use shadowing or non-participant observation, and we set up an arrangement that lets users speak while the activity is under way.
Follow the experience over time
When a service is used over a long period, we add diary studies. We send prompts to a sample of users, through a messaging service, and they record their experience in the moment, by written or voice message, in their daily life.
Analyse and report back
We lay out the material collected, we bring it back to the initial grid, and we deliver the findings in a form the project team can work with.
We have done it on real sites
Helping 250,000 festival-goers and 5,000 volunteers at the Paléo Festival
See how the volunteers' experience shapes the festival-goers' experienceFrequently asked questions
It is the study of users' activity in real conditions of use, in their actual environment. It serves to explore the motivations behind the behaviours observed, where a decontextualised method mainly tells you what people do.
Both go looking for use where it happens, and we often run them together. In practice, we say field observation for the collection itself, carried out against a grid and with expert methods such as shadowing or non-participant observation. In our studies, the two words cover the same work: going out to understand activity in real conditions of use.
When the gap between what people say and what they do weighs on the design, when the environment constrains use, or when you are designing for a job you do not practise. If your question is about how often a behaviour occurs rather than why, a questionnaire will cost less.
Yes, provided the setup is calibrated against the research question and the number of sites to cover. Diary studies, for their part, take calendar time but little team time, and they run alongside the rest of the project.
It depends on the number of sites to cover, the length of immersion and the collection setup. We quote once we have understood your research question and your constraints on field access, because access to users shapes the budget as much as the method does.