I214: User Experience Research

ETHNOGRAPHY IN INDUSTRY: OBJECTIVES? BY VICTORIA BELLOTTI & PARC / JUNE 1ST 2010  UX Magazine

Forsythe, Diana E. (1999) “It’s Just a Matter of Common Sense”: Ethnography as Invisible Work. Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) 8:1,  pp.127-145

Beyer, H. and Holtzblatt, K. Contextual Design: Defining Customer-Centered Systems. San Diego: Academic Press, 1998. Chapter 1 – Introduction

We are not going to study contextual inquiry/contextual design per se, but it’s a method people talk about.  The term “contextual inquiry” has become a more generic term for field-based observation, rather than a label for Beyer and Holtzblatt’s method.

Blomberg, J., Burrell, M., Guest, G. An ethnographic approach to design. In Jacko J. A., Sears A. (eds.). The Human-Computer Interaction Handbook: Fundamentals, Evolving Technologies and Emerging Applications. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.: Mahwah, New Jersey, 2003.   Long, but classic overview of much of what we’re talking about.

David R. Millen. Rapid ethnography: time deepening strategies for HCI field research. Conference proceedings on Designing interactive systems : processes, practices, methods, and techniques. ACM, 2000.  The HCI world talks a lot about rapid ethnography; ethnographers are horrified.

Video Getting People to Talk: An Ethnography & Interviewing Primer: very useful.

Done by IIT Institute of Design.  Interviews with people who do ethnographic interviews for human-centered design.  You have to get past the intro on-the street interviews  — I can’t imagine anyone in Berkeley being willing to do these interviews, given how many people on the street here want money, signatures on petitions, and the like.

Note also the variability in sound quality and the way they place some interviewees.  NOT good!

Look at this also for interviewing.