Ethnography
Ethnography Description
Ethnography is simply the study of human beings in their natural environment, involving the observation of what and how respondents accomplish different tasks (as opposed to asking people how they perform a task because they often skip over steps that they consider insignificant or irrelevant). As opposed to the more academic applications of ethnography, when ethnography is used for the development of products or services it is often referred to as "design ethnography", which is the branch that we will discuss as it relates to understanding consumer needs and preferences.
Ethnographical Training
Ethnography is essentially a science and some of the best ethnographers tend to be highly educated in psychology, anthropology or in ethnography (which is currently offered only at a few schools). Often the actions and processes that are studied make more sense when the respondents' psychological make-up is taken into consideration.
Ethnography Pros
- Ethnography is the deepest of the research methods detailed (meaning that they provide a great deal of detail about how the respondent actually acts.) Ethnography is great at uncovering customer pain points that might have been deemed too insignificant for a respondent to mention in an interview (or the respondent assumes that there is no possible solution to their problem.)
Ethnography Cons
- Ethnographies are very expensive on a cost per opinion basis, although as mentioned before they go much deeper than other methodologies.
- Ethnography is very invasive from the respondents point of view, and it can be hard to recruit to participants, although it can be done - usually with the help of generous incentives.
Ethnography Example
Rumor has it that several years ago, a few employees from Mr. Coffee were conducting research (customer visits or ethnographies) with a Mr. Coffee customer when the customer grumbled something about having to wait until the entire coffee pot was completely brewed before he could start on his first cup of coffee. After the team thought through this limitation, they developed a mechanism that would allow the coffee pot to be taken out of the coffee maker by the customer, pour a cup of coffee and replace the coffee maker without having the heating pad overflowing with burnt coffee. Still today, on their web site they have termed this capability "Brewing Pause 'n Serve" and have made it a primary selling point.
Ethnography Timing
Depending on how much time is spent with each respondent it can take a long time to get a reasonable sample of a certain type of customer. Typically 2 or 3 ethnographies in a day is the most that can be done, and in some cases an ethnography may take an entire day with just one respondent. Conducting an entire study of 20 or 25 ethnographies can easily take two weeks just in the fielding - and when you add planning, data analysis and the creation of a presentation, an ethnographic project may take 5-7 weeks to accomplish. Although the presentations often have a great deal of detail and insights into both customer opinions as well as their practices. Ethnographies can be very helpful in environments with complex tasks (which are often laden with opportunities for simplification).
Applications of Ethnography
Ethnography is good for identifying unmet needs with existing products or services. Ethnography can also be used to get inside the head of customers, to understand what really motivates them to act in a certain way.
Special Considerations
You may notice some similarities between customer visits and ethnography. The truth is that the two are quite similar with a couple of pretty significant differences: typically ethnography is led by an ethnographer and secondly most tasks are asked to be performed live by the respondent, for the visiting team to watch, while in customer visits most workflows are simply explained step by step.
