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.

Read the rest of this entry »