Ethnographic research is a qualitative and mostly longitudinal method which is used in order to look deep into interaction between persons and services or products in their own environment.
I would like to start with giving some definition about what ethnography is in order to associate it with Service Design. Ethnography is a branch of anthropology, which seeks to understand a single culture or a structure within a culture. Ethnographers attempt to reach as close as an insider’s perspective of life by diving into development of a culture and relation between culture and individuals’ behaviour. What we all understand from culture would differ, so what I mean here is a shared knowledge passed on by learning that unites a community. It is appropriate to say that culture started to be shared from infancy by observation and then it turns into imitating the actions that is seen from family, school or media. It would not be wrong to highlight that the first factor which affects the characteristics of an infant is always family members, and the others come later.
There will be some ethnographic research methods below, which helps designers and researchers to explore how those people see the world because while designing or redesigning a service, it is the core point to avoid assumptions.
“We view the research phase as a way to understand the world in the same way that the customer or employee does. If you feel that you do this, then you have a platform that makes your ideas and concepts better and more relevant.’’ — Simon Clatworthy
Contextual Interview
Contextual interviews are conducted with customers, employees, relevant stakeholders in a situational context in order to understand emotions, needs, expectations of a certain group of people better.
It is preferred to be conducted in its natural settings because it provides the researcher opportunity to observe the elements of the environment and how participants interact with those. Furthermore, when participants are interviewed in their own environment, they feel more secure so they tend to tell more and be open. It is quite important for a researcher to make participants feel familiar. Therefore, before conducting the interviews and also during the interview, researchers try to establish trust from participant’s side in order to reach deep insights.
While talking to a participant, it is quite significant to analyze the body language and gestures of them. It gives a better understanding to the researcher about their personality and what they exactly mean deep inside.
One of the most important things about contextual interview is the creating of interview questions. The questions must be non-leading in order to achieve real and pure answers from participants. If there would be any leading words or actions, interview would not be successful to gain real datas. So, researchers should give much attention to deciding the right questions in preparation process according to what they want to find out in order to have an effective research.
Audio and video recordings during the interview provides researchers data triangulation which means using more than one method to collect data. It assures the validity of research and leads to a more comprehensive understanding.
Datas and understandings which are gained from contextual interviews are useful for creating personas and system maps. Also, details of concrete experience of journey maps could be gained from contextual interviews.
Diary Study
Diary study is a qualitative research method which reveals users’ habits, activities and experiences. In a diary study, participants log their daily activities just like self-documenting their life.
The main point before starting to a diary study, researchers should give clear instructions to participants about what they expect from participants. Even researchers could create some task which are expected to accomplish by participants in a specific time and place. While this self-documentation, researchers can synthetise, analyze and collect datas about participants’ day-to-day activities which participants would not even remember if they were asked.
Another core point about diary study is that researcher should allow participants to take videos or photos when they want to highlight a situation. As we mentioned above, data triangulation always offers a better understanding about the situation.
Diary study could be conducted both online and offline. If it is conducted offline, researchers could send a box which contains a book in order to log the experiences and a even a camera to help participants to take photo about the situation. If diary study is conducted online, there are some ethnographic research applications which can be utilized for the diary study method. Online diary study is generally more preferred during our time because we all have our smartphones with us.
Observation
There are two main ways of observation in ethnographic research, which are participant and non-participant observation methods. Firstly, I would like to talk about participant observation that research objects know that they are under examination by researchers.
Participant Observation
While participant observation method provides researchers to observe digital and physical activities, interaction of participants, researchers can immerse themselves in the live of research subjects.
One of the benefit of participant observation is that researchers could switch between passively observing a participant to actively asking questions to get deeper understanding. Researchers could also take photos or videos during the experience, so this allows researchers to cross-check after the research while analyzing datas. In this method, it is also quite significant to observe what participants do not do, what they ignore and avoid rather than just only focusing on what people do. So that, researchers could get aware of the missing points.
While observing participants, researchers should take notes 3 main notes about activities: what participant do, what participants say during the experience if they are asked by the researcher and how researchers interpret those situations.
However, there are some difficulties while conducting participant observation. One of the biggest challenge with participant observation is ‘’observer effect’’. Since when people know that they are observed, they could consciously or unconsciously behave differently. So, building trust between researcher and participant is essential while striving to influence the participant as little as possible.
Participant observation include some methods like shadowing, a day in life and work-along which we can speak in detail later.
Non-participant Observation
In non-participant observation method, researchers behave like ‘’a fly on the wall ‘’ so that participants would not know they are observed. Research subjects are generally observed in situations that are related to the research questions in order to achieve what researchers want to find out.
Taking notes of concrete observations is important during the observation, but also researchers give attention to taking notes of their own interpretation. Furthermore, as I mentioned before in participant observation, observing what participants do not do, what they avoid is crucial for analyzing the datas.
Focus Group
Focus group is a qualitative research method which aims participants to feel free to talk about given subject in order to understand their opinions, ideas, perceptions about specific products, services.
In this method, 4–12 persons could be invited to the focus group. Before inviting the guests, participants should be identified and recruite the participants to come. Also agree on roles with the team like who is going to ask questions and who is going to take notes. Then, during focus group day, participants can be gathered in a room which a microphone and a recorder were placed. Never forget to start with introducing yourself and everyone in the room, then the purpose of the focus group should be shared with the participants. Generally moderator ask the initial question and participants start to discuss about the subject.
The environment that focus group will be conducted should be comfortable and again researchers should avoid leading-questions to not to shape participants’ answers. Focus group questions could start with some engagement questions which can reveal general opinions of research subjects about given topic, then move into exploration questions to dig deeper understanding about topic and finish with exit questions in order to allow participants if they would like to add something about topic.
Researchers try to write up their individual key findings and learnings like a summary right after the focus group and compare these findings within their team. Researchers can add some quotes, photographs or videos to their summary in order to get better understanding. Then, compare these findings with their previous research to see if there is any point they differ. If they do, researchers try to find why and continue to conduct more focus group till they identify the reason.
These ethnographic research methods could be used while designing a service or product in order to define a problem when it is not clear, identify stakeholders, explore the factors associated with the problem and document a process.
An hallmark of an ethnographic research is that researchers should be involved in the community in their natural settings they are trying to explore. Researchers should immerse themselves in research subjects’ lives to understand why those people take some specific actions, how they interact with digital or physical products, and most importantly what key factors shape their perspective of life. Therefore, designing a service for the target people could be possible otherwise the design could be just for ourselves.
Another thing we should not miss to highlight is that design is an iterative process so after research phase, if there are any gaps we could start to research again and again. It never ends…
Reference
Markus Edgar Hormess; Adam Lawrence; Marc Stickdorn; Jakob Schneider — This is Service Design Methods (2018, O’reilly Media,Inc.)
