Steve Portigal contributes his perspective of ethnographic research and its applications.

As companies continue to realize the need for understanding customers (especially when considering the launch of a new product or entering a new market) they are turning to tools such as "ethnographic research." With designers, market researchers, anthropologists and others offering this sort of service, trying to put forward an acceptable definition of ethnographic research is an increasingly tricky endeavor. The literature is littered with alternative terminology, from "site visit" through "contextual research" through "user safaris." Although precise terminology is not without its place, it's probably more useful here to set the jargon aside and consider a simple three-step process:

1. We examine our users (be they consumers or other) in their own context
2. We develop a set of inferences (you might also call this interpretation, or synthesis)
3. We apply our new insights to a business or design problem otherwise, why are we doing the work?)

Of course, it's the stage of "examine our users" that gets the most attention, because it's the most tangible part of the process. We can further break that into three key activities:

1. Observation

- watching what people are doing, how they do it, getting a sense of usage, and of process

2. Interviewing

- interacting directly with some people who can shed light on our problem, be they customers, users, former customers, future users, lead users, etc.
- asking questions, giving them exercises or tasks
- listening to what they say, how they say it, what they don't say
- paying attention to where what they say and what they do doesn't align

3. Understanding cultural context

- considering the culture within which our people are making decisions
- looking at media, trends, advertising, and other symbols of cultural "norms"

So often, companies go to the trouble of studying customers, only to address the opportunities revealed by usage. For example, an award-winning snow shovel was redesigned when the design team went out to watch how their product was being used, found that women instead of men were shoveling, and so they made the handle smaller.

But there's much more that can be revealed. What is the shoveling occasion (or, if you will, ritual) really about? What meanings does it hold? Does it hearken back to childhood? Or does it represent female independence? Or the nurturing of motherhood? Or the abandonment by men? Probably it's none of those, but the point is that within the ordinary activity of shoveling we can find deep meanings that can provide enormous opportunities for innovation as we question the basic assumptions about what the product could possibly be.