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Ethnography framework

Ethnographic framework has been developed specifically to help structure the presentation of ethnographies in a way that enables designers to user them. This framework has three dimensions

1. Distributed coordination
2. Plans and procedures
3. Awareness of work

1. Distributed coordination

The distributed coordination dimension focuses on the distributed nature of the tasks and activities, and the means and mechanisms by which they are coordinated. This has implications for the kind of automated support required.

2. Plans and procedures

The plans and procedures dimension focuses on the organizational support for the work, such as workflow models and organizational charts, and how these are used to support the work. Understanding this aspect impacts on how the system is designed to utilize this kind of support.

3. Awareness of work

The awareness of work dimension focuses on how people keep themselves aware of others’ work. No one works in isolation, and it has been shown that being aware of others’ actions and work activities can be a crucial element of doing a good job. In the stock market example this was one aspect that ethnographers identified. Implications here relate to the sharing of information. Rather than taking data from ethnographers and interpreting this in design, an alternative approach is to train developers to collect ethnographic data themselves. This has the advantage of giving the designers firsthand experience of the situation. Telling someone how to perform a task, or explaining what an experience is like is very difficult from showing him or her or even gaining the experience themselves. Finding people with the skills of ethnographers and interaction designers may be difficult, but it is possible to provide notational and procedural mechanisms to allow designers to gain some of the insights firsthand. Two methods described bellow give such support.

• Coherence
• Contextual design

Coherence

The coherence method combines experiences of using ethnography to inform design with developments in requirements engineering. Specifically, it is intended to integrate social analysis with objectoriented analysis from software engineering. Coherence does not prescribe how to move form the social analysis to use cases, but claims that presenting the data from a ethnographic study based around a set of “viewpoints” and “concerns” facilitated the identification of the product’s most impotent use cases.

Viewpoints and concerns

Coherence builds upon the framework introduced above and provides a set of focus questions for each of the three dimensions, here called “viewpoints”. The focus questions are intended to guide the observer to particular aspects of the workplace. They can be used as a starting point to which other questions may be added as experience in the domain and the method increase. In addition to viewpoints, Coherence has a set of concerns and associated questions. Concerns are a kind of goal, and they represent criteria that guide the requirements activity. These concerns are addressed within each appropriate viewpoint. One of first tasks is to determine whether the concern is indeed relevant to the viewpoint. If it is relevant, then a set of elaboration questions is used to explore the concern further. The concerns, which have arisen from experience of using ethnography in systems design, are:

• Paper work and computer work
  • Skill and the use of local knowledge
  • Spatial and temporal organization
  • Organizational memory

Paperwork and computer work

These are embodiments of plans and procedures, and at the same time are a mechanism for developing and sharing an awareness of work.

Skill and the use of local knowledge

This refers to the “workarounds” that are developed in organizations and are at the heart of how the real work gets done.

Spatial and temporal organization

This concern looks at the physical layout of the workplace and areas where time is important.

Organizational memory

Formal documents are not the only way in which things are remembered within an organization. Individuals may keep their own records, or there maybe local gurus.

Contextual design

Contextual design was another technique that was developed to handle the collection and interpretation of data from fieldwork with the intention of building a software based product. It provides a structured approach to gathering and representing information from fieldwork such as ethnography, with the purpose of feeding it into design. Contextual design has seven parts:

• Contextual inquiry
• Work modeling, consolidation
• Work redesign
• User environment design
• Mockup
• Test with customers
• Putting it into practice

Contextual inquiry

Contextual inquiry, according to Beyer and Holtzblatt, is based on a masterapprentice model of learning: observing and asking questions of the users as if she is the master craftsman and he interviews the new apprentice. Beyer and Holtzblatt also enumerate four basic principles for engaging in ethnographic interview:

Context:

Rather than interviewing the user in a clean white room, it is important to interact with and observe the user in their normal work environment, or whatever physical context is appropriate for the product. Observing users as they perform activities and questioning them in their own environment, filled with the artifacts they use each day, can bring the allimportant details of their behaviors to light.

Partnership:

The interview and observation should take the tone of a collaborative exploration with the user, alternating between observation of and discussion f its structure and details.

Interpretation:

Much of the work of the designer is reading between the lines of facts gathered about user’s behaviors, their environment, and what they say. These facts must be taken together as a whole, and analyzed by the designer to uncover the design implications. Interviewers must be careful, however, to avoid assumptions based on their own interpretation of the facts without verifying these assumptions with users.

Focus:

Rather than coming to interviews with a set questionnaire or letting the interview wander aimlessly, the designer needs to subtly direct the interview so as to capture data relevant t design issues.

Improving on contextual inquiry

Contextual inquiry forms a solid theoretical foundation for quantitative research, but as a specific method it has some limitations and inefficiencies. The following process improvements result in a more highly leveraged research phase that better set the stage for successful design:

• Shortening the interview process: contextual inquiry assumes full day interviews with users. The authors have found that interviews as short as one hour in duration are sufficient to gather the necessary user data, provided that a sufficient number of interviews (about six wellselected users for each hypothesized role or type) are scheduled. It is much easier and more effective to find a diverse set of users who will consent to an hour with a designer than it is to find users who will agree to spend an entire day.
• Using smaller design teams: Contextual inquiry assumes a large design team that conducts multiple interviews in parallel, followed by debriefing sessions in which the full team participates. Experiments shows that it is more effective to conduct interviews sequentially with the same designers in each interview. This allows the design team to remain small (two or three designers), but even more important, it means that the entire team interacts with all interviewed users directly, allowing the members to most effectively analyzed and synthesized the user data.
• Identifying goals first: Contextual inquiry, as described by Beyer and Holtzblatt, feeds a design process that is fundamentally taskfocused. It is proposed that ethnographic interviews first identify and prioritize user goals before determining the tasks that relate to these goals.
• Looking beyond business contexts: the vocabulary of contextual inquiry assumes a business product and a corporate environment. Ethnographic interviews are also possible in consumer domains, though the focus of questioning is somewhat different.