Ethnographic Insight: Manhattan Vets Store Their Extra Prescription Pet Food Where They Can

It’s been a great week in the field conducting ethnographic interviews with veterinarians and vet techs.  Mostly we’ve been in Manhattan, where food storage in the animal hospitals is a major issue.  We’ve seen bags of prescription chow stacked in hallways and offices, hidden in unused cages, stacked on surgical operating tables and x-ray equipment, and almost always taking over the waiting rooms and foyers of the client greeting area.  Someone should devise a drop-shipping or home delivery scheme wherein vets can earn their margins re-selling the supplies but don’t have to receive and store the inventory.

I doubt this idea will be used by my employer, which for this job is our scientific, technical, and medical publishing division, Wiley-Blackwell.   I’m lucky to work for a company that is committed to understanding its customers with this kind of research before embarking on a product idea.  My favorite study design of late for the early, product discovery phase of user research is to do 10-12 remote contextual inquiry interviews via phone and web conferencing software, followed up by 5-6 in-home or in-office ethnographic visits.   It’s a large enough of a sample to cover a couple of key audience segments and really learn their unmet needs, but still quite cost effective.  And even just a few visits out to a respondent’s real environment crystallizes the findings and brings the research to life.  We’ve refined the mechanics of fielding a study like this without breaking the bank, so let me share a few pointers with you.

Tip 1 – Skip The Video

Getting an edited video as an end result of ethnographic research is great – it’s like having an entertaining and informative documentary movie of the customer’s behavior.  But unfortunately it costs about the same as making a feature length documentary.  The editing time is the deal-breaker here.  You return from the field with a minimum of two to four hours of source footage for every respondent, which becomes two to four minutes of finished video in your report.   Getting from hours to minutes requires multiple passes at sequencing and culling the clips – moving from the ’select reel,’ to the ‘rough cut,’ to the ‘final cut’ – with multiple client and research team review milestones at each phase.   The media management alone (e.g. screening, logging, digitizing, and compressing clips) requires an experienced video editor to be anything less than overwhelming, so this kind of research is virtually always outsourced to specialist market research firms.  My advice – skip the video and bring only a portable DAT recorder and a small digital camera along with you.

Olympus DS-40 DAT Recorder

I love my Olympus DS-40 which I use with their ME-15 lavalier microphone (purchased separately).  This recording rig cost less than $150.   I press record, clip the mic to respondents lapel, drop the recorder into their pocket, and forget about it.  Then I use my point-and-shoot digital camera loaded up with a huge SD card and take photos of everything – including any screens on the computer we might look at.  The audio and pictures can even be combined in the final PowerPoint report for an experience that’s not that far from watching a video.   To pull this off, use transcripts of the audio recordings to identify clips you want to use in your report and have the transcription service pull the clips for you once you’ve identified what you want to use.  Transcripts are expensive, but transcribing a whole research study of 6-10 respondents is cheaper than one respondent’s worth of outsourced professional ethnography with video.

Tip 2 – Hire a Good Recruiting Firm

Don’t even think about doing your own recruiting, unless that’s your business.  Even if you have your own customer lists, turn them over to the recruiting service.   Finding, contacting, scheduling, and confirming qualified respondents for a user study requires constant attention and will become your main job for the 2-3 weeks before the research dates if you try and do it yourself.   Then when the study is over, you will be busy mailing out incentive checks.   Why not sit back and get daily updated spreadsheets of scheduled respondents instead?  Good recruiting firms will also help you write your screening questionairre, advise on the liklihood of finding who you are looking for, handle all participant communication including confirmation emails, reminder calls, etc., and disburse incentives.    Different firms operate in different regions, so it will require some legwork to find a good firm that covers the market where you are fielding your study.  Whenever possible, I try and use the amazingly responsive and organized folks at Focus Forward.  Or if you are using a full-service research firm like Sachs Insights or Catalyst Group Design (in NYC) or Serco (in London) you don’t need to worry about this.

Tip 3 – Ask for The Tour

Don’t take the trouble to visit a respondent in their own environment and then have an interview you could have had on the phone!   For in-home or in-office interviews I structure the discussion guide in a slightly different way than I would for an in-lab interview.  The key difference is that 15 minutes into the visit, after I’ve warmed up the respondent with a little chit chat and background info, I say “Hey, can you take us on a tour?”  This tour becomes the rest of the interview.   Start pointing at things, asking them to open cupboards and drawers, explaining as they go.  Write observation notes into your guide so you remember what sorts of things you should be looking for.  I’m usually interested in how things are organized and setup… what sorts of things wind up out on a table or desk vs. buried in a drawer?  How do they have their browser favorites folders set- up?  What sorts of ad-hoc customizing have they done to support their workflow? etc.   This may not be the fly-on-the-wall method of an anthropologist, but we’ve got a limited amount of time here and need to learn what we need to learn, so it’s time to force the agenda.

Tip 4 – Bring along a Prototype

Designs Always Feel Different Out in the Field

Theoretically, the design minded ethnographer should go into the field with few assumptions about what the final product will look like.  The main goal of any contextual phase of user research is to wind up with a good sense of the audience’s workflow and a list of their unmet needs.  Only after uncovering the customer’s unmet needs should the true product brainstorming begin.   But the reality is that we rarely have the time or budget for multiple rounds of discovery research.   If  we’re lucky, we’ll get the opportunity to get our ideas in front of customers once or twice before we have to commit to building something.   I like to bring concepts into the field.  If it’s for a website, which my work almost always is, I like to see mock-ups on the respondents’ real computer in their real environment and get them to talk about them.   What looks viable from the desk in our offices can be seen in an entirely different light in the field.     Load your sketches or design mock-ups on an extranet and access them from the respondent’s computer in the field.  If you’re interested in watching them react to real websites, create bookmarks on Delicious so you can find them quickly when you need them.

Tip 5 – Be Reflexive

The practical ethnographer still must be an effective and ethical ethnographer.   Most important of all is to exercise reflexivity, which for the field researcher, translates into the mental state of being aware of your own presence and impact on the environment that you are observing.   If there is a super star in the world of user anthropology, it is certainly Jan Chipchase – who vagabonds the world on behalf of Nokia.   Having recently heard Jan speak, I was impressed by his reflexive stance and sensitivity to his surroundings when he works in the field.   For instance, he always stays in the same places his respondents live (which for Jan, who works in the developing world extensively, is really saying something) not the Four Seasons across town.  I’m also pretty sure he doesn’t show up at the respondents’ homes with his iced grande frappacino and his Blackberry.   I recommend Mitch Duneier’s published ethnographic study of the Greenwich Village homeless street vendors, Sidewalk, to learn more about ethnographic field methods.  The appendices of this book alone are invaluable insights into how a truly reflexive researcher works.