User Experience 2008
Chicago
Nov 2-7		 Amsterdam
Nov 16-21

Qualitative Field Studies: Using Real-World Insights to Inspire User-Experience Design, Drive Product Innovation, and Deliver Business Success

  • Chicago: Wednesday, November 5
  • Amsterdam: Thursday, November 19

Christian Rohrer
Full-Day Tutorial

Real world insights are based on what your target consumers actually do and believe, not what they say or you think they do.

Although all research methods have advantages and disadvantages, ethnographic field research is the most powerful qualitative method available because they are grounded in direct observations of behavior and attitudes of users in their natural context.

In this course, you’ll discover how to use qualitative field research to generate real-world insights that can inspire great user experience design, drive product innovation, and ultimately deliver business success.

What You’ll Learn

In this session, you’ll learn:

  • How to plan for and execute ethnographic field research in many different company contexts
  • When and how to best use ethnographic field research in combination with other available research approaches and insight-generating methods
  • Basic theoretical frameworks and approaches to analyzing ethnographic field research data
  • Producing results that will inspire design, innovate product, and help achieve business success
  • How to build a large-scale ethnographic research program in-house

Course Outline

  • Research methods and purposes
  • What you get from ethnographic field research
  • Purpose and approach: When should ethnographic field research be conducted?
    • Strategic phase
    • Design phase
    • Assessment phase
    • Inspiration phase
  • Company culture, decision-making, and business practices
  • Return on investment (ROI) and discount methods
  • Planning for a study
  • Theoretical models for analysis
  • Data collection mechanisms
  • Data analysis primer
  • Data analysis session (small groups)
  • Presenting your findings
    • Persuasive techniques with qualitative research results
    • Research triangulation: Combining findings from ethnographic field research with quantitative results
  • Follow-up research plans and communication strategies
  • Final Q&A/discussion

Format

This full-day tutorial encompasses lectures, large-scale visual representations and concepts, video highlights and research reports, and in-class exercises.

Throughout the day there will be individual and team exercises, including a lunchtime exercise in which teams will do observational fieldwork.

Handouts

Copies of presentation slides.

Who Should Attend?

This course is designed to immediately help those responsible for understanding their customers in depth (research professionals) and those who develop or design interactive products and need to make use of such insights (designers, developers, product professionals). A secondary audience is those who make key decisions about the management of interactive products, including the business results.

Instructor

photo of Christian Rohrer Christian Rohrer is a 10+ year veteran of Web user experience research and design, having participated directly in the development of some of the world’s most popular web destinations, including Yahoo!, eBay, and Realtor.com. In his current role as Sr. Director of User Experience Design at Move, Inc., he leads a team of designers and researchers in the development of some of the top real estate sites on the web. Prior to this, he served as Director of Customer Intelligence for Products at eBay, where he was a founding member of the eBay Research Council, an executive-sponsored body that advises the company on best research practices and synthesized insights from market research, community outreach, international research, web analytics and user experience research. He was previously Director of User Experience Research at Yahoo!, where he was also a founding member of the Yahoo! Research Council there. Prior to Yahoo!, he conducted ethnographic research for NCI (now Liberate), focusing on the strategies employed by people learning to use interfaces on TV-based Internet appliances. Earlier in his career, he spent five years working as an independent UNIX consultant and two years as a support engineer at SCO. Dr. Rohrer received his PhD in symbolic systems in education (cognitive science) from Stanford University and a B.A. in computer and information sciences from the University of California, Santa Cruz.