posts tagged ‘ethnography in industry’

Mythbusting: Corporate ethnography and the giant green button

20 December 2010 | Editor

Because ethnography provides a complete, nuanced, and valid picture of people’s practices, processes, and product use in context, it’s a powerful tool that can provide actionable insight and reduce corporate R&D risk. The pioneering use of social scientists in technology corporations -- often referred to as corporate ethnography -- has largely been attributed to, well, us. But this isn't intended to be a who-begat-whom post. We're just trying to set the record straight on the popular tale of ethnography at PARC, because the way the story unfolds reveals how powerful a tool it can be...

Ethnography in Industry: Methods for distributed & large data sets (part two)

30 August 2010 | Nick Yee

We believe that virtual worlds and similar Web 2.0 spaces hint at an emerging mixed or "hybrid" ethnographic methodology that depends on agile collaborations between quantitative researchers, qualitative researchers, and software engineers. This is not just an academic enterprise. The ability to glean this data has many implications for designing and scaffolding online communities, learning new aspects of personality and social behavior in online worlds, and mapping digital personas to physical needs. The ability to leverage this architecture for more tailored marketing is one commercial opportunity. In addition to inferring basic demographics, personality inferences may lead to more nuanced methods of targeted advertising. And the ability to infer demographics based on online interaction metrics helps fill in the gaps left from zip code segmentation alone -- after all, not everyone who lives in your neighborhood (or in your home!) is exactly like you...

Ethnography in industry: Methods overview (part one)

14 June 2010 | James Glasnapp

It's really hard for companies to understand ethnography -- even after they understand what objectives it can be used for. In this second post in our series on ethnography, I thought it might be useful to provide an overview of data COLLECTION methods (and methodologies) that ethnographers use to understand a particular population or situation of interest; while specific needs vary, for our clients the general goal is to help them address a murky problem or innovate differentiated products. Note the emphasis on data "collection" as opposed to data ANALYSIS...The science and art of ethnography is not in a preset formula for these individual methods. It's in the selection, unique combination, customizations, and analysis -- which together can yield the "deep" understanding that in turn inspires innovation, or fosters change. There IS a method to the madness.

Ethnography in industry: Objectives?

27 April 2010 | Victoria Bellotti

All of us have encountered a lot of confusion and misconceptions about ethnography, especially relative to the many methods that can be used to inform technology design. In my first post here, I’d really rather respond to the obvious and eminently reasonable question I often hear in my work as a researcher in the field of user-centered technology innovation: “What’s it good for, in my business?” In today’s hard-nosed and often economically trying times, ethnography can be seen as a tactical weapon enabling companies to gather new insights and thus gain advantage over their competition. Ethnographers’ data collection and analysis methods have therefore been condensed, recombined, adapted – both systematically and as-needed – to meet these business demands.