Ethnography

Q: What's the difference between ethnography and field observation?

Field observations are one part of what an ethnographic study can draw on. As we said, ethnography is a discipline in its own right and you can't reduce it to the observation method.

Q: How do you transcribe and analyse ethnographic data?

Before transcribing them, you have to capture them. Ethnography involves immersion in a real situation, generally over a long period. You can take notes, record interviews, film or take photographs, and so on. All this ethnographic material is the raw material for the analysis. A big part of the work is organising and sorting all this data. The analyses that follow are just as varied, depending on the subject studied and on the purpose.

Q: Is ethnography compatible with an agile project?

Probably not easily if you take ethnography in its most original form. Once transposed into a mindset within a user research approach, it becomes more realistic. What you need to remember is that you can adapt and above all target the fields studied so as to provide decision-making material useful to digital projects.

Discipline

From reported experience to lived experience in situ

Ethnography is a social science discipline built on the direct observation of the ways of life of a particular population. Applied to user research, it takes the form of an ethnographic approach: observing users in their real context of use, as close as possible to reality. UX research therefore borrows some principles and some data collection methods from the ethnographic approach, without claiming the title of ethnologist.

Users don't always know why they do what they do. That is one of the issues ethnography makes it possible to include in data collection. When you question a user, they reconstruct part of their answer; faced with a familiar task, they aren't necessarily aware of the automatic habits acquired through practice. The philosopher Michael Polanyi called this tacit knowledge, in 1958: "We can know more than we can tell."

By watching someone do it, you gain access to things a respondent doesn't express spontaneously. You can help them put this implicit part of their actions into words by asking them to spell it out, using techniques such as the explicitation interview, which can itself draw on self-confrontation (replaying with the user the recording of a sequence of their activity, for example).

What is ethnography for?

Reaching what interviews don't capture: automatic behaviours, tacit practices, environmental constraints that change how something is used without anyone mentioning it.

Why use ethnography?

Shadowing: following a user step by step, without intervening.
Fly on the wall: observing from a withdrawn position, without interacting.
Undercover: joining in as a full participant in the experience.
Eye tracking in context: following the gaze on a real journey, outside the lab.

Preparing your fieldwork

Defining what you want to observe and why. Writing a list of hypotheses to check in the field, preparing an observation grid with precise indicators, defining the area and the profiles to include.

Collecting the data

The choice between the four collection techniques depends on the level of disturbance you can accept: the more involved you get, the more you risk changing the behaviours you are observing.

Analysing and reporting back

Sorting, cleaning and interpreting the data. Comparing the observed behaviours with the initial hypotheses and identifying the gaps with what the interviews had produced. Typical deliverables: annotated verbatims, enriched personas, usage maps.

What's the difference between ethnography and field observation?

How do you transcribe and analyse ethnographic data?

Is ethnography compatible with an agile project?

Alma behind the counter: from checkout flow to cash drawer

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Understanding how a green space is used to make it safer

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With SNCF Connect, the rail network seen through 18 travellers with sensory impairments

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Related methods

Field observation

Field observation watches users in their real context, with a structured observation grid.

User interview

The user interview goes after what questionnaires don't capture. 5 types of interviews, how to choose, and the trap of social desirability.

Service design

Service design shapes the whole experience of a service, online and at the counter, beyond its screens. Definition, public sector and examples.

Design thinking

An innovation-management method built on 5 pillars that make for a useful thinking framework. A heads-up: it's no magic recipe.

UX mapping

UX mapping represents a concept or a problem in a simplified form, to make it easier to understand and take ownership of.

Qualitative research

Qualitative research explores users' motivations and barriers. It answers the why where quantitative metrics stop at the what.

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