archive for the ‘ethnography’ category

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.

Innovation: defining, doing, measuring

31 March 2010 | Mark Bernstein

[The Economist invited us to contribute an abridged version of this post, "How do you define innovation?", for their blog.] Innovation is a sorely overused word. Yet we are constantly asked to define it. A number of theorists and practitioners have offered up their variations: product innovation, business model innovation, technology innovation, design innovation, radical innovation, incremental innovation, disruptive innovation, open innovation…and so the list goes on. All are useful; none are complete. I don't have a pat answer, catchy definition, or compelling metaphor for this. But here’s what I do know: however it is defined, innovation is a valuable change, unconstrained by the way things are. I think I can safely claim that we’re speaking from experience…

It’s the market disruption, not the disruptive innovation

28 January 2010 | Jennifer Ernst

Disruptive innovation is about market impact. No business model or new technology is intrinsically disruptive. It's the application in the market, and the reaction of the consumer, that determines whether something is disruptive or not.

Experts’ domain knowledge improves automated recommendations

9 November 2009 | Ellen Isaacs

It’s almost eerie how well the music website Pandora recommends music based on just one example of a favorite song. It does so by relying on human experts to characterize songs based on a large and musically sophisticated set of characteristics (melody, harmony, rhythm, orchestration, etc.). This approach -- of using human expertise to develop a rich set of attributes that deeply capture the essence of an item -- could be adapted to greatly improve the recommendations currently being offered in other domains, such as news, movies, hotels and so on. In our enthusiasm to develop automated recommendation systems, Pandora reminds us of the value of incorporating the intelligence of domain experts into the process.

Reducing the password burden: Implicit Authentication

17 August 2009 | Elaine Shi

How many times a day do you enter passwords in different places AND multiple times in the same place? While passwords are the most widely used method for authenticating users to computer systems and protecting our information, they're also difficult to remember, inconvenient, poorly used, and not always secure. There are multiple ways to authenticate us (something we know, have, are) -- but why not use our habits or routines to implicitly authenticate us?

Experimenting on Mechanical Turk: 5 How Tos

21 July 2009 | Markus Jakobsson

Performing human-subjects experiments on Amazon Mechanical Turk offers many benefits, including very low experiment costs, quick turn-around rates, and relatively simple approvals from human subjects boards. But you have to be careful to avoid bias and error...

The future of pervasive marketing: Scenarios

30 June 2009 | Bo Begole

"Responsive Media" applications are one of the most exciting areas of current research in human-computer interaction. Based on technologies that can detect human response using cameras and other sensors to glean demographic data (gender, race, age) and physiological states (eye gaze, orientation, pupil dilation, skin temp, expression), these applications can be used for human-robot interaction, marketing, gaming, digital concierge avatars, and more.

Making projectors more social?

29 June 2009 | Yutaka Yamauchi

So many of us get frustrated with projectors. When you connect your display cable, the image doesn't show, or it's stretched, or it's cut off. You try to troubleshoot but as the audience is waiting quietly, you have to give up and blame the projector. Projectors are interesting to us because they imply a social activity, but are not in fact social. You need to use a projector in front of an audience that is looking at you -- but is the current design appropriate? How can we go about designing such a technology?