(@elledog)

Sometimes the thought of doing research, especially primary research, seems daunting.  The planning, screening and recruiting the right participants, conducting the research itself, transcribing notes, uploading video files, writing reports, can take weeks and even months to accomplish. Not to mention the cost of such research projects.

In specific cases, large research projects are necessary and warranted. When an organization is attempting to redesign a significant portion of their product or service, or embarking on creating something new and valuable for their business, it is often wise to invest in rigorous research - both primary (ie. customer interviews) and secondary (ie. analysis of articles and journals); qualitative (ie. small sample size, deep dive approach) and quantitative (ie. large sample size survey)

But, what about all the other times? When we’re not making sweeping changes to the core of the business or offering? More often than wholesale redesign, organizations are making small changes and adjustments, generating ideas and testing their current offering in market. Research does not typically play a role in this workflow. Research is often reserved for the big whammy redesign projects as described above.

We’ve had the opportunity to work with a Toronto hospital in helping them understand how people interact in groups, and specifically how mobile technology plays a role in that interaction. We had constraints - one being budget and another time. We had none and/or very little of both. So we asked ourselves, how can we conduct nimble, focused primary research to feed early hypotheses and generate ideas quickly and cheaply?

We wanted to avoid what Steve Blank writes about: The Leading Cause of Start-up Death: The Product Development Diagram. Traditional processes for creating, developing and launching products and services aren’t ideal for start-ups. It’s too much of a crap shoot and not human-centered enough.

Directly from Steve Blank’s talk: “For a start-up to be successful, you need a separate process to test all the fundamental hypotheses about customers and markets and business.”

With this in mind, we set out to conduct nimble, focused primary research for our hospital client. The goal being to feed meaningful insights into our customer discovery phase - insights that would help us generate ideas and create and test early for the design problem we were trying to solve. We used a very simple form of guerilla ethnography as inspired by Jan Chipchase.

Ethnography is the study of cultures. But, also the writing and documenting of cultures. Ethno means “culture” and graphy means “to write.” The method is grounded in observation of people in their natural habitats and involves “writing” or documenting the facts about the culture without interpretation. Ideally, an ethnographer immerses oneself in the culture to be studied. Margaret Mead, arguably the most prominent and accomplished cultural anthropologist of our time, spent nine months immersed in Samoan culture to understand adolescent girls.

With our budget and time constraints, we weren’t able to immerse ourselves for an extended period of time, thus we used guerilla ethnography. These were the steps we took:

1. Define a specific research goal: “Gain understanding of how people interact in small groups while out in the city, with a specific focus on the role/usage of mobile technology.”
2. Determine easy to use documentation tools: written notes and flip-cam video.
3. Choose a location close by, but appropriate to the goal: Dundas Square, Toronto.
4. Select specific spots to conduct observation: I sat on the street corner, my partner in the square itself.
5. Conduct observation for determined period of time: We spent half hour each in our respective spots, met up and did some quick analysis, then chose new spots for another half hour segment.
6. Conduct unbiased observation: We were very focused on writing strict factual observations of what we saw with no interpretation.
7. Document everything. We wrote down everything we saw. We video recorded as much as possible.
8. Return to the office and have a conversation: This was our analysis and synthesis. We talked about what we observed, analyzed deeper meaning and synthesized some of the patterns that stood out. See my article on analysis and synthesis for more of a deep dive on this approach: http://www.uxmatters.com/mt/archives/2009/04/analysis-plus-synthesis-turning-data-into-insights.php
9. Draft a simple report and socialize: We communicated the patterns and themes from our ethnography, and discussed possible implications and ideas with our client. Socialization of patterns and themes is important as it’s like an early test of the findings. Do they ring true with others?

End-to-end this “research project” took 1 day and cost virtually nothing. It provided some good early findings and insights that served as a foundation for ideation and hypotheses creation. This human-centered foundation was a good insurance plan for us as we headed down the path of creating products and services for customers. Ideally, as we move forward, we will conduct more in-depth research and testing utilizing different methods as appropriate. But, this was a great jumping off point.