Examples of Ethnographic study and their impact in different work environments.
Health Care Industry: Control Room Study
This example is about the work conducted in the control room of an ambulance service of a large metropolitan region in the
1) It was noted that ambulance dispatch is a contingent affair with multiple considerations impinging upon dispatch selections. Commonly, Dispatchers can resolve these contingencies through interaction with the different resources available to them.
However, oftentimes contingencies will be managed not merely through the interaction of individual Dispatchers with system resources but through social interaction amongst Dispatchers and Supervisors. Indeed, on occasions, the significance of a contingency may be resolved through interaction between control room personnel and others outside - a member of the public still on the line or an ambulance crew. For example, it was noted that the timing of meal breaks for crews has to be considered in making dispatch decisions. The severity of an overdue meal break and hence its significance for the work of dispatch is often argued out between Dispatchers and the crew themselves. Observations like this make everyone sceptical about the feasibility of automatic decision making systems in the ambulance service systems which might, say, dispatch ambulances on the basis of algorithms operating to satisfy multiple constraints. Accordingly, the ethnographer’s development agenda is to investigate how systems can be designed for a socio-technical setting where co- operation is a normal feature of how work is done.
2) It was observed that the staff was used to dealing with many emergencies at a time. Some were dealt individually while others were dealt with the help of other staff members somewhere in the control room. Technologically, the systems were homogenous and not user dependent in any manner. Hence the end result of whatever process was being carried out was the same irrespective of who the user was. Workers complain of the high levels of noise as people shout at each other at peak times when they need solutions from other people seated in various places. If some of what is achieved through that noise (an awareness of what others are doing) is removed from the medium of speech and supported with enhancements , the 'air would be clear' for managing the most difficult contingencies. Rearranging the seating or adding of some kind of technology to clear this air was an area of improvement noted by the ethnographers.
3) While several features of the centre's GPS are frequently used, the 'flagship feature' often promoted by the manufacturers, a map like display of ambulance locations on a large computer screen is rarely consulted. The Automatic Vehicle Location System (AVL) is typically turned away from the sight of the Dispatchers even though it is on the work surface alongside them, and only easily inspectable by Dispatchers or Supervisors if they come close. To understand this, it is important to realise that obtaining geographical fixes on the ambulance fleet is only one part of judging which to dispatch and how to maintain adequate cover (there are many contingencies together at a time), and a swiftly visible presentation of the relevant aspects of ambulance location can be given by the GPS's computation highlighting proximal, available candidates. A literal visual representation of ambulance locations might require a worker to engage in further deliberation to extract these details from a cosmetically impressive display. Furthermore, the AVLS screen only shows one part of the region at any one time. Horizontal and vertical scrolling to find visualisations of ambulance locations on a map mostly full of 'empty' streets and countryside is needlessly time consuming when, in contrast, the Vehicle Availability Map (VAM) compactly shows ambulances with a geographical sensitivity that is appropriately approximate for dispatch decisions. Importantly, on the VAM, all the ambulances are represented there (along with relevant status information), they do not have to be found in a 2D map-space.
In short, for the purposes of dispatch and cover, seemingly crude lists may be the most appropriate form of representation, giving an easy impression of how many ambulances are available at every station. However, again, it is possible that more cover relevant information could be introduced to the Dispatchers' own resources for ambulance selection. In this regard, re designing of the Dispatch Selection screen to contain 'at a glance what if information' is necessary.
4) The opportunity to design for third parties, that is, to design interaction techniques, key sequences, screen changes and so forth so that they can be detected by others as appropriate occasions for, say, initiating interaction. In the ambulance control room, ethnographers gave the observation that considering re designing of the screens and interaction techniques used in dispatch would be good to make it more noticeable by third parties when selections are made and when (and which) changes in view take place. This way the process will be understood by any third party coming into the control room.
Kitchen Cabinet Case Study
A team of researchers along with a group of ethnographers from Diamond Cabinet, a division of Master Brand Cabinets Inc. studied the American kitchen area by living with different households for one full day to observe, photograph and videotape families as they interacted, cooked and cleaned in their kitchens. The ethnographic study spanned a geographically diverse area of the
Among those features, Diamond Cabinet researchers found, are the following:
• No wasted space. People conceptualize "wasted space" as a very bad thing, the Diamond research revealed. "They want to use every nook and cranny in their kitchens, regardless of how much storage space they actually have," Small explains, emphasizing the need for cabinets to carve out space where none existed before. For example, a new "Toe kick Cabinet" creates extra storage space beneath base cabinets, just above the floor. A tap of a toe opens a hidden storage compartment.
• Overflow storage. Almost everyone has a kitchen overflow storage solution in the garage, basement or closet. However, research indicates that the concept of having "extra" or overflow storage may be a positive thing for some. It provides an "out of sight, out of mind" option for items used infrequently, or which people aren't ready to part with yet. It also provides a space to stock up on items purchased in bulk, reinforcing feelings of taking care of their family and saving money. Cabinets with pantry-like storage features can solve this need, anywhere in the home.
• Drop zones. With so many people coming in and out of the kitchen, homeowners expressed a need to keep track of all of the "droppable" items that clutter up their countertops: keys, cell phones, coupons, notes from school, etc. Diamond recently introduced a unit called the "Mini Message Center," a three inch deep bonus storage unit that features a row of key hooks, a metal cubby divider, fixed shelves and a write-on message board, all concealed behind a cabinet door. And because it fits on an end run of cabinets, it takes up no additional wasted space.
•Changeable solutions for changing lives. Depending on people's life stages, they have different organizational and storage needs. For example, older people or those who have trouble bending and reaching can benefit from well designed lazy cabinets that make it easy to see and reach items that would otherwise become lost in a "black hole" corner cabinet.
•"Junk" drawers. Everyone seems to have junk drawers, and surprisingly, "they like them the way they are," according to Diamond. Many consumers have multiple junk drawers and even "specialty" junk drawers containing sub sets of "junk" items. For some people, access to built in drawer organizers gives them control over the contents; for others, simply having items "out of sight and out of mind" gives them a temporary feeling of organization.
•Kitchen cabinets as medicine cabinets. Researchers discovered they were, in effect, peeking into medicine cabinets after all, upon learning that some medicines are stored in the kitchen. Although the majority of medications are stored in the bath, many people are keeping at least a few items in the kitchen because it helps them remember to take them. Cabinets with flexible interior configurations can meet this need, Diamond researchers point out.
Diamond cabinets used these insights to create better designed cabinets for different segments to cater to their needs.
Ethnography at Intel
Ethnography at Intel initially focused on new markets. The company had provided products only for the workplace, but in 1995 managers wondered whether users at home would become a distinct market. Ethnographic research showed so much potential that Intel set up a business unit to concentrate on processors and platforms for home use.
Recently, Intel ethnographers have veered into strategic questions. Like many high tech companies, Intel makes long-term bets on how markets will play out. Will television and PC technology converge? Are baby boomers retaining their PC and TV habits as they age, or are they comfortable shifting to new media? Will smart phones take over most of the functions of personal computers?
Intel can analyze the latest buying patterns and customer surveys for useful data. But people often can’t articulate what they’re looking for in products or services. By understanding how people live, researchers discover otherwise elusive trends that inform the company’s future strategies. With smart phones, for example, we can contrast the technology perspectives of teenagers, who have used cell phones since they were in elementary school, with those of older generations, who came to them only after becoming proficient with PCs.
Ethnography has proved so valuable at Intel that the company now employs two dozen anthropologists and other trained ethnographers, probably the biggest such corporate staff in the world.
Virtual Ethnography
Many firms today are using Virtual Ethnography to study the way their customers behave in the virtual world and try and relate the behaviour to something they can benefit from. Many video game designers, social media designers and most of the people making a living out of web 2.0 believe it important to study the way a person behaves in a virtual world as it reflects a lot of their likes and dislikes which enable better designing of applications.
Tom Boellstroff’s book: “Coming of age in second life. An anthropologist explores the virtually human”, explains this in great detail. The book is an account of two years field work and an anthropological ethnography of avatar life in Second Life, a virtual platform, designed for social interaction and collaboration. Avatars are virtual personages created and Tom’s avatar was the anthropologist in 2nd Life, interviewing, observing and, first and foremost, participating in social life. This resulted in a good understanding of social life at Second Life. Tom explained that although it was difficult to tell whether the avatar you were talking to was a man or woman, different persons or human at all, social interaction between avatars in 2nd Life was ‘real’.
Dmitri Williams of the Annenberg school for Communication studied all server logs of 3-D game Ever Quest and concluded that gamers have behavioural patterns online. An example, players who live 10 kilometres of each other play five times more intensively than people who live at larger distances. And Sony, the owner of Ever Quest is very interested to work with ethnographers that could help them understand their gamers’ behaviour.
In order to facilitate learning of public and private partners in construction, a simulation game on 2nd Life centred on a megaproject, the tunnelling of train, road and tram infrastructure in Amsterdam’s corporate suburb Zuid-As. One group played the public office, three others played private construction firms trying out a competitive alliancing tender model. In this model, partners have to collaborate in order to get the best solution for a complex problem, without knowing yet who will get the assignment. Employees (better: avatars) were first trained how to behave themselves at the research island. The island was bought out as a separate game area, so as to have a selected group of people in the project. However, at one stage of the game the thought of opening up the island for a broad audience to let them make a pubic choice of what the best design would be was floated. This has not been applied yet. But, this was an excellent study method to understand the way public and private construction partners worked as also what exactly the optimal design would be based on the peoples’ choice, once it was opened to them.
Large companies such as the ABN Amro Bank have built digital offices to attract young customers and to try out virtual services. So, the field of virtual ethnography is but obviously of tremendous importance in the days to come.
Ethnography in the Cross Cultural work place context.
People from so many cultural background study and work in close cooperation at universities and public and private organisations. The so called essentialistic perspective has become very popular in contemporary management literature and consultancy and is highlighted by European authors, such as Hofstede (1990) and Trompenaars (1993). The work of Hofstede and Trompenaars, who have developed ‘cultural maps of the world’ in which each country can be situated based on their score on different indexes, fitted perfectly in the assumption that culture is a (more or less) stable entity that can be ‘engineered’, and managed. However, recent evaluations of these essentialistic cultural programs are not positive in regard to organizational costs and sustainability.
A large project management firm had asked help to manage their large diversity of workforce. The company had employees of more than 35 different national cultures working in complex projects. Instead of training the management on all these cultures , the collaboration practices at the work floor were studied from a socio material perspective which includes spatial settings, materiality and social behaviour. It was found that engineers and project employees of both the company and the client gathered around so called “roller boards”. These are tables that can roll and have large paper drawings of installations on them. Around the roller board, 6 different professionals stand, hang and are bending over the drawings. In debating which objects had to be left out, changed or added, each of the 6 professionals got time to explain their view, experience, perspective. If agreed upon, different colours were used to materialize the debate and colour the drawings on spots were the debate was on. The manager was surprised as he wanted to replace the roller board by a computer system, which would have ruined this efficient cross cultural collaborative practice. In this way ethnography can be used to study cross cultural collaborations in organisations all over the world and eliminate a number of problems thus increasing productivity manifold.
Downloading Firefox 3 and the digital divide
The new version of the Firefox web browser was released on June 17th 2008 with much fanfare in circles that get excited about web browsers. The Mozilla folk were attempting to crack a Guinness Book record for the most downloads in one day, and they appear to have been successful with reportedly more than 8 million copies of the program downloaded in the first 24 hours.
Mozilla, on their website provided an interactive map of global downloads. Although it is not Mozilla’s intention to relate their launch with any kind of anthropology or ethnography, it provides a graphic example of the discrepancies between access to IT globally. Most striking are the grey areas with low downloads which cover most of Africa. Note that the figures are raw numbers of downloads rather than per capita figures, so this skews the impression somewhat. For example, China seems to be right up there with best of them but the figure of 160 odd thousand downloads about the same as Australia, with only about 2% of the population.
The most intriguing detail was the large number of downloads in Iran, the USA’s enemy number 1; more than downloads in Australia, China, Russia, Canada, Italy or Brazil. It is upto us to wonder what is going on there. What is the source of this enormous Iranian interest in the premier open source web browser? Is there widespread hatred of Internet Explorer and Microsoft? This is definitely an area where ethnographers can play a major role.
A few Ethnographic techniques used in Corporate Ethnography
Pure Observation
In this technique, the researcher is taken out of the equation and acts as an objective observer. A researcher might use this method by observing how customers interact with an ATM, videotaping customers’ interaction with a point-of-purchase display or watching a client navigate a website and recording their key clicks and mouse clicks.
Contextual Interviewing
This method uses a master-and-apprentice approach rather than an interviewer-and-subject model. The researcher plays the role of an apprentice who is curious and wants to learn. This technique is used for uncovering unstated details of a work process, new uses and features for a process, and actual versus intended use of a product or service. It is often valuable in user interface design and usability studies.
Guerrilla Ethnography
For unfiltered, reality-based encounters, researchers can observe and talk with people in their natural environments without disclosing their intent. It is often used only in pilot research to help in the preparation of interview guides and survey question preparation.
The Environment Agency – Erosion Map Case
This is a good example of ethnography can be translated into design.
Flow, an agency was commissioned to conduct contextual research and subsequently design an interactive map that will provide users with coastal erosion information – a national project that will affect 2.1 million houses on the coast. Simon Johnson, User Experience Consultant at Flow explains the process followed. The key objectives were to establish what an erosion map should look like, how it should work and what sort of information should accompany the map. Claire Mitchell, Flow’s Principal Consultant on the project and Simon started the project with a research phase that included ethnographic field observations in two coastal settings: Norfolk and Hastings. Simon spent two weeks documenting the lives of coastal communities, interviewing local people and immersing himself in their lives. Additionally, Simon interviewed eight professionals at Flow’s experience labs in London.
The research that Claire and Simon conducted described how emotive the coastline is, an institution in British history that invokes strong feelings and forms a strong part of a shared heritage. The implications were the need for the Environment Agency to communicate that it cares and to reassure people that action was being taken to protect the coast. It was also clear that people trust locals and distrust central government, erosion maps caused alarm and that a certain amount of local knowledge derived from ignorance and/or myth. An example of a myth was the commonly repeated argument that the government was making money dredging ‘their’ sand.
The design approach focused on a simple website that addresses the needs of both professionals and locals. Claire and Simon decided that the design should answer core questions and myths, stick to plain English, use local materials and represent risks without alarming local people.
Result:
The Book store Ethnography
The goal of the study was to understand how bookstores use space to create and maintain brand identity and shape customer experiences. More broadly, the study was to understand practices, patterns and meanings associated with different types of bookstores.
Chain bookstores are seen as stores for everybody, whereas independent bookstores are often conceptualized as catering to repeat customers, “regulars” and certain clientele. These impressions are partly determined by the layout and signage in the store. There is a sense that one can find things on one’s own in chain bookstores, with well labelled sections, large overhead signs, and short shelves so one can see the span of the store. The feeling that one can find one’s own way in the store also allows shoppers to avoid interaction with employees. This gives them a greater sense of anonymity, and a greater level of comfort. In addition to the anonymity found in some bookstores, other qualities of a bookstore can be comforting.
One is a store’s layout. Layout matters most when a store is busy. Aisles that are broken up help so that one can get lost in the books and not see the crowd. Hidden alcoves with overstuffed chairs, lend themselves to a less hurried atmosphere.
Interactions with employees also affect comfort level. This often depends on the customer, as some seek this interaction in order to feel welcome while others prefer to shop with as little interaction as possible.
When shoppers set out to purchase a book, they conceptualize their experience as either a journey or goal oriented shopping. In the journey, shoppers conjure images of adventure and treasure hunting, where the search is the thrill. One participant described this as being “like flea market shopping”, you aren’t looking for anything but you like the experience and it’s hard to walk out without something cool.
Those who are interested in the journey are more likely to find this experience in independent and used bookstores. Here, stores are set up in a way to accommodate this explorative aspect of shopping, with hidden nooks and cranies, no giant overhead signs directing one to certain sections, and inability to see the entire store at a glance. In this case a haphazard, difficult retail space works. In contrast, shoppers who are in the market to find a specific book may be more likely to shop at a chain bookstore with new books. They won’t waste time looking at used bookstores. At new bookstores, they can get in and out with the correct book without fuss.
One participant mused, “We are all brought up with reverence for books”. It was clear through our participants’ stories that books are much more than a commodity. They are seen as a vehicle for knowledge and discovery, as something to be cherished. Books are as investment in the future, more meaningful and significant than the monetary values placed on them.
So, customers cringe when books are treated as commodities by stores, and when customers perceive that the stores are more focussed on volume of sales than respect for books. Many customers feel that independent bookstore owners have a reverence for books and treat them in a way that chain bookstore owners and employees do not.
The study explains as to why there are different kinds of bookstores and how different customer needs can be satisfied by understanding the customer using ethnography.
References:
Websites:
http://hbr.harvardbusiness.org/2009/03/ethnographic-research-a-key-to-strategy/ar/1
http://www.ethnographic-research.com/bookstore/
http://faculty.chass.ncsu.edu/garson/PA765/ethno.htm
http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1119117
http://www.ethnographic-research.com/research/researcha.html
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=305151
http://www.customer-experience-labs.com/category/ethnography/
http://www.ams-inc.com/npd/ethnography.asp
http://it.toolbox.com/wiki/index.php/Ethnography
http://www.nps.gov/ethnography/training/TAPS/attachment.htm
Books:
Social Science Methodology -
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