Innovative companies are finding that direct contact with customers is the key to creating an experience that leads to business results. But how do you ensure that your web site actually gives customers what they need? What are the best ways to understand your customers’ goals, behaviors and attitudes, and then turn that understanding into business results? You are not your user – and you know it!

Design Ethnography is usually conducted to gain a deep understanding of the client’s target market in order to apply a customer-centered approach to the strategic development of the client’s brand in the context of a complex dynamic ecosystem that borders on chaos. In addition, ethnographic research seeks to reveal insights into how the target market shares information about about their problem space and potential solutions with their immediate social cohort.

Design ethnography takes the position than human behavior and the ways in which people construct and make meaning of their worlds and their lives are highly variable and locally specific. One primary difference between ethnography and other methods of user research is that ethnography assumes that we must first discover what people actually do, the reasons they give for doing it, and just as importantly, how they feel while doing it, before we can assign to their actions and behaviors  interpretations drawn from our own experiences.

Findings from a design ethnography project will influence both near-term problem setting and experience design activities, as well as longer-term interactive mediated ecosystem development development. During the study I seek to uncover pertinent insights about the target market’s experience enframing their goals, objectives, and perspectives as it directly relates to the client’s brand, and the role that these activities play with regards to interactions with their environment including context, family, friends, and community.

Personas bring customer research to life and make it actionable, ensuring the right decisions are made based on the right information. At Semantic Foundry, our approach to persona development draws from an array of quantitative and qualitative tools and methodologies, including internal stakeholder analysis, customer interviews, customer and prospect surveys, and statistical analysis.

Persona Research Flow

Persona Research

With a full set of analyzed data, Semantic Foundry enumerates the findings into crisp personas based on behavior trends. These realistic character sketches document the specific goals, behaviors and attitudes of each customer, and are ultimately used to guide decision-making throughout the site design and development process, as well as other strategic business decisions.

Persona Overview - Master Sheet

Our combined qualitative and quantitative approach to persona creation offers several key advantages over more traditional methods, including the ability to map the personas back to existing marketing segmentation, financial, and demographic data. While this is not always possible, this correlation between the personas and the segments provides a three-dimensional picture of customer behavior; the segments revealed what customers are deliberating, desiring, doing, and the personas revealed how and why. In the Overview screen above, each of the personas placed on a line to show the various segments, what their expertise is, their motivations (“get it done,” versus “aspiring foodie”); which maps back to demographic segmentation based on where they are in the customer lifecycle. Why do it like this? When you fully integrate your UX personas with marketing segmentation information, it means that new marketing campaigns can be mapped back to specific archetypes – so you can ensure that the site you designed will support the marketing campaigns you have planned – it all works together.

Target Audience Persona

The resulting personas are not only deep, rich and reliable, but expand from a design tool to a powerful tool for defining business strategy. The specific details in this persona start with high-level information about the user segment, but add color by writing a compelling narrative to instantiate the person – it’s not just about the user’s goals, needs, and the projects/products to support those – this is about creating a deep empathetic bond with the user segments. Bottom left side is filled out with demographic information, but when designing social media sites, this could be replaced with Forrester’s technographics information if that provides more meaningful context for your design problems.

Bonus: The source Adobe Illustrator templates for the above persona documents are available for you to download (10mb Zip), remix, and use in any way you wish. We open source our design templates.

Design Ethnography Resources:

• An introduction to ethnographic research
  Steve Portigal contributes his perspective of ethnographic research and its applications.
  “As companies continue to realize the need for understanding customers (especially when considering the launch of a new product or entering a new market) they are turning to tools such as “ethnographic research.” With designers, market researchers, anthropologists and others offering this sort of service, trying to put forward an acceptable definition of ethnographic research is an increasingly tricky endeavor.”

• Inside Your Users’ Minds: The Cultural Probe
  “Theoretically, usability testing is a great way of finding out what is wrong with the products and services we design. We sit the users down in the lab and ask them to perform certain tasks, to “tell us what you think—give voice to your stream of consciousness.” And on the whole, it works.”

• An ethnographic approach to user experience: a bibliography
  From Louise Ferguson.

• Coming of age in ethnography
  “I first heard of ethnography in Sociology 101. In his sonorous voice, our professor regaled us with tales of intrepid anthropologists immersing themselves in little-known cultures in exotic settings. We discussed Margaret Mead’s seminal work, Coming of Age in Samoa. We examined the rigors of fieldwork, the tension between observation and participation and the challenge of analysis. It was a great class and I even opted for Soc 102. And that was that. Ethnography faded into the recesses of my mind until reawakened with a start a few years ago when I began hearing it applied to Web design. And it scared me spitless.”
  (Dave Rogers – Goto Report)

• Electoral ethnography
  The British newspaper, The Guardian, is offering an interesting way for British readers to gain an insight into the electoral experience currently sweeping the United States. The content feature, sponsored by Olympus, strongly resembles a primary activity of usability research: the ethnographic study. Ethnography is a technique developed largely by anthropologist Margaret Mead. It involves behavioral observation, contextual interviewing and analysis of users in their work, home or play spaces.

• Field studies: the best tool to discover user needs The most valuable asset of a successful design team is the information they have about their users. When teams have the right information, the job of designing a powerful, intuitive, easy-to-use interface becomes tremendously easier. When they don’t, every little design decision becomes a struggle. While techniques, such as focus groups, usability tests, and surveys, can lead to valuable insights, the most powerful tool in the toolbox is the field study. Field studies get the team immersed in the environment of their users and allow them to observe critical details for which there is no other way of discovering.

• Implications of ethnography for design (PDF)
  “Although ethnography has become a common approach in HCI research and design, considerable confusion still attends both ethnographic practice and the metrics by which it should be evaluated in HCI. Often, ethnography is seen as an approach to field investigation that can generate requirements for systems development; by that token, the major evaluative criterion for an ethnographic study is the implications it can provide for design. Exploring the nature of ethnographic inquiry, this paper suggests that ‘implications for design’ may not be the best metric for evaluation and may, indeed, fail to capture the value of ethnographic investigations.”
  (Paul Dourish)