Akendi explains the ethnography behind its approach to UX design

At first blush it seems like a case of Big Brother meets big data.

Imagine employees working away in their office. A camera is poised above each computer screen, capturing every staffer’s move and daily digital workflow. A researcher sits observing the action, perched quietly at an adjoining desk – or maybe hidden behind two-way mirrored glass. All the while, a staggering amount of data is collected from each computer and crunched through analytics software. It goes on like this for a month or two.

At the end, the researcher’s observations, videos and big data metrics are melded to produce a user experience study. It’s all been done to help the creators of The (Hopefully) Next Big Software Program figure out whether their target users will actually like – and thus buy – the product they’re developing.

This little composite scenario is one example of ethnographic field research (EFR). It’s an immersive, observational way of finding out what kind of experience a potential product or service will generate for users – before it actually hits the market. While traditional product trials and testing happen after a product is released, EFR happens in the early development and design stage.

“It’s about a researcher going out in the field with a real end user or customer and observing their behaviour or interaction,” says Shaun Illingworth, managing director at Akendi, a five-year-old Toronto firm that uses EFR in its user experience research, design and consulting business.

“Sometimes you’re talking to a disabled person about how they go about their day. Sometimes you observe how people use a watercooler or interact with computer screens. It’s looking at their environment and what they use and what’s around them, trying to understand the pattern of use to get a new product right.”

EFR isn’t just used by tech developers and designers. Right alongside BlackBerry and Microsoft on Akendi’s client list is the Department of National Defence and the Toronto Public Library. And EFR itself is nothing new. Illingworth is, in fact, an alumnus of the ethnography unit at the late Nortel Networks. He says that although Nortel embraced EFR during the 1990s in a bid to find its own Next Big Thing, the company ran out of steam, customers and cash. Then the dotcom bubble burst and overall investment in EFR dried up in the IT industry.

Now the tech sector is showing EFR all kinds of love (and money) again. Akendi, which just opened an office in the UK, has seen its overall business grow by 25 per cent each year for the past five. Things are different with this wave of EFR in tech, however. Chastened by the dotcom implosion that saw too much money poured too hastily into unproven pitches, IT is now investing in EFR again. Why? Well, it’s one way to show there’s proof in the pudding before it even gets to the oven.

“At a lot of tech companies, their response was ‘Let’s just start coding and users will follow.’ But in the technology space today, that era is dead,” declares Illingworth. “First, understand your users. And then start coding or manufacturing (the product) or whatever the case may be.”

With the old ‘build-it-and-they-will-come approach’ falling out of favour, EFR is seen as a way to remove some of the risk and cost from product development. It’s not always an easy sell, though; Illingworth says many new clients question whether they need to spend money on EFR so early in the development cycle. Politely reminding them that about 95 per cent of new products fail within the first year, he then asks them if they can afford “the cost of getting it wrong.”

Another factor boosting the latest EFR renaissance is the emergence of new technologies that allow user data to be collected, shared and analyzed: mobile, social media, wearable devices and big data analytics. These can now be combined with traditional EFR tools like observation, interviews and user ‘shadowing.’ This mix adds a new quantitative, data-based component to complement EFR’s qualitative strengths.

“Like with wearable technology… if I can get the ‘in the moment’ information from consumers that they can only reinvent or recreate through (user) surveys, I might have a really interesting feedback loop to help with product development,” says Mike Gotta, a research vice-president at Gartner who’s based in Somers, Connecticut.

In a January report, Gotta writes that EFR is still “in its infancy in terms of enterprise acceptance.” Yet he forecasts that “design ethnography (will) proliferate during the next three years” as large IT firms embrace the marriage of traditional EFR methods with newer data collection and analysis technologies.

In his report, Gotta even advises IT firms to bolster their EFR efforts by hiring people with backgrounds in anthropology and sociology. Just last year, Microsoft lured Canadian sociologist Sam Ladner to Seattle where she’s now a senior user researcher in the company’s Office division.

Though Gotta is more gung ho than Illingworth on what the new data-based technologies can bring to EFR, both are adamant that ethnography will always require the participation of human beings – product users and field researchers – to truly capture the intangible elements of user experience (what Gotta refers to as a blend of “in-the-moment and emotion”). Ethnographic field research, Gotta says, can’t rest on device-based data alone.

“A lot of times the data will tell you what is happening,” he says. “But not why.”