Ethnographic Techniques

This part of the toolkit is about specific techniques you can use to undertake research. Keep in mind as you follow the links below that no single project would use ALL of these techniques - ordinarily, you might expect to use two or three for a particular project, depending on what you’re trying to find out. 

UX research by its nature is an ethnographic form of research in which we seek to understand the users’ experience and manner of engagement within a particular environment, from the user's perspective.

Ethnographic research often has the following attributes:

1. The study is carried out within the everyday context of the participants (for example, in the Library)

2. Observation and / or conversation are pre-eminent in the data collection method

3. The data is collected in a highly flexible manner and in as raw a form as possible

4. Usually (but not always) ethnographic research involves studying a singular setting or cohort of people, and a small number of individuals are involved. A UX project involving 25 people would be considered quite large, so the numbers of participants involved are much smaller than traditional data-gathering methods such as surveys and Focus Groups 

5. In the analysis stage, statistical analysis is usually less important than interpretation of meaning and function: we are trying to truly understand the user’s experience, rather than quantify it. Ethnographic research is most often qualitative rather than quantitative: in other words it focuses on opinions, thoughts and trends rather than statistics, numbers and facts.