And finally, after months of derailment, and a ton of good longitudinal projects, we’re live!  A little history here

Discovered this eBook on Ideo’s Method Cards at the Healthcare Innovation by Design Blog.

From the Ideo website:

IDEO Method Cards is a collection of 51 cards representing diverse ways that design teams can understand the people they are designing for. They are used to make a number of different methods accessible to all members of a design team, to explain how and when the methods are best used, and to demonstrate how they have been applied to real design projects.

IDEO’s human factors specialists conceived the deck as a design research tool for its staff and clients, to be used by researchers, designers, and engineers to evaluate and select the empathic research methods that best inform specific design initiatives. The tool can be used in various ways—sorted, browsed, searched, spread out, pinned up—as both information and inspiration to human-centered design teams and individuals at various stages to support planning and execution of design programs.

Inspired by playing cards, the cards are classified as four suits—Ask, Watch, Learn, Try—that define the types of activities involved in using each method”

I was asked this question at the Anthrodesign group, in the context of a conversation around getting into the swing of a project and developing some working momentum . I shared there, how I often find myself turning to my blog and twitter communities for helping me with my thinking on qualitative and ethnographic research projects. I was then asked these questions: Could you elaborate a bit more on how you tap into your twitter community? with the limited character set, do you drive them to answer in more detail on your blog? How effective have you found twitter in generating meaningful conversations and resources?

Sharing my response here with a few modifications – there are many many ways I use Twitter, apart from keeping in touch with people, the world, and sharing warm fuzzy feelings or rants. I’ll try and describe some of these:

• If I’m looking for advice (from a community I trust) on say which phone to buy next, or where to find macbook chargers, or how to solve a particular problem I find I can really rely on my twitter community.  During the Mumbai 26/11 terror attacks Twitter was what kept many of us feeling ‘safe’ (in the way of experiencing it together) and connected to the outside world, as we were stuck in our homes. We also used it to try and reach out to people who were affected – eg. sourced and published lists of victims from hospitals (and directed people to those lists via links on twitter). I’ve often also used Twitter to help mobilize action around immediate causes like someone needing blood of a certain group in a specific hospital. But these are all very specific short term needs being addressed by quick responses.

• I often use Twitter (and my blog – they’re linked BTW) to have meaningful conversations, tease out some areas, ask for help on resources, opinions, suss out experts, or participants for studies. Obviously, with no mention of the actual client or specific subject of research. A recent example – a client is looking to understand Durability as a driver for purchase in her category, and I  broadened the issue and asked a question on Twitter  - the thought to actually blog this series started off with this tweet – and responses to it - looking for evidence that ‘durability’ as a brand proposition isn’t a big purchase driver for youth today. egs, links anecdotes welcome!”.  Sometimes its linked back to my blog, or to something someone else has published and I’m always amazed at both the depth and width in the sharing of perspectives that it evokes.

• And I use it increasingly to share links around what I’m reading or find interesting. The way I do it, is bookmark the link on Delicious and I’ve automated it to show both at my blog, and on Twitter. Often, these are starting points for meaningful conversations among several tweeters who share similar interests. And as importantly, if not more, I get to see all their marvelous links too!

• Or to live-tweet an event I’m at, as I did with TEDIndia last year and then just aggregated my tweets at my blog, and TedXMumbai more recently. The interesting thing about such tweets is you actually have people responding back in real-time, you feel your community is ‘present’ too, and often their questions and comments are shared back at the conferences. These could be conferences around my areas of work too.

• To amplify interesting thoughts, ideas, requirements, needs of others I follow on twitter thru RTs.

• Every post I make on my blog, every bookmark I link to at Delicious – is tweeted. As a result, it helps me broadcast my thoughts, and encourages people to come in and add to the conversation. It really doesn’t bother me where they do this – as today it’s possible to weave much of this into a lifestream of sorts. (I know this might be annoying to those who follow my blog, my twitter profile, and facebook as there can be much repetition – I need to find a way to sort this one out!)

So to answer the question more directly … I find I’m using Twitter increasingly both as a quick-byte sort of space – in and out, and as a gateway or pipe through which information and conversations flow!

Would love to hear your views – How do you use twitter or your blog in generating meaningful conversations and resources around what you do?

Is a good series from Portigal Consulting on an exploratory study using an ethnographic approach to explore the evolution of books and reading habits, and is intended to inspire conversations and innovations around the future of reading, an issue that’s quite a meme these days in the digital space! The series takes us on a journey through the research process that leads to the generation of insights for innovation and product design.

Apart from the findings which are interesting, and worth a separate dialogue in themselves, I find that sharing the process of research, as Steve and his team have done, really demonstrates the use of different methods and techniques you can use in qualitative research and ethnography during the different stages of a project. You might have heard these terms being thrown around, and wondered what they mean – the team, with this series of blog posts, situates them in a real project, gives them meaning and brings them alive. Ethnography, secondary research, recruitment and screening of participants, contextual inquiry and show-and-tell methods of interviewing, visual and video diaries, kits and materials for participatory design, interview guides, props that help inspire imagination around future designs and that get participants to create artifacts themselves, analysis and reporting formats, are just some.

I think researchers and ethnographers worldwide use many of these tools and techniques but we rarely get the opportunity to share them with other researchers, as most are Client specific and are bound by confidentiality issues.

Thank you Steve and your team for sharing these so openly – we can all benefit! It’s also a great collection and a primer for those interested in understanding the process of research for participatory design and future directions across product categories.

“A month ago, we announced the launch of Reading Ahead, our self-funded exploratory study on the evolution of reading and books.  We’re excited to report that we’ve finished synthesizing our field data, and have published our findings. You’ll find the narrated presentation on our blog, along with numerous posts detailing our process throughout the project. It’s been great to work on a project we can discuss so openly, and we hope to hear from folks and continue the dialogue around this work.”

Check it out the full series: Reading Ahead

And slides which form the final output:

Dr. Aviva Rosenstein – “Fake Ethnography vs Real Ethnography” at URF08 from bolt peters on Vimeo.

In a review of the User Research Friday Talks, Celeste Roschuni provides a recap of Dr. Rosenstein‘s talk:

….. and finished with the idea that it’s more important to be doing good research than to be doing “real ethnography.” Aviva laid out a few criteria for “good research” (which should sound fairly familiar to anyone involved in research):

1. avoid biases (or at least try to identify yours as clearly as possible)
2. be reflexive, truthful
3. be ethical
4. collect data, check assumptions, triangulate, record observations
5. don’t just report, look for patterns
6. deliver credible and valuable insights
7. generate new ideas
8. be creative and resourceful

I like the reference to bricoleurs and Bricolage. Many years ago I had posted some links around qualitative researchers as bricoleurs - here’s a quote from the Admap article [link is broken now] that still resonates, and is reinforced by the talk by Dr. Rosenstein:

This means a new ‘proposition’ for qualitative market research – a shift from:

* ‘we use contact with consumers to generate material from which to extract insightful and useful meaning’
to:
* ‘we use qualitative methods of detection and analysis to extract insightful and useful meaning from all sorts of ‘texts’ relevant to consumer culture’

Interesting intersections between YouTube, qual research and ethnography. Visual observations and reporting have always been very powerful in research.  Some recent explorations and projects around this:

YouTube as a Qualitative Research Asset: Reviewing User Generated Videos as Learning Resources
by: Ronald J. Chenail, Nova Southeastern University, Fort Lauderdale, Florida [Source: The Weekly Qualitative Report Volume 1 Number 4 October 27 2008 18-24]:

YouTube, the video hosting service, offers students, teachers, and practitioners of qualitative researchers a unique reservoir of video clips introducing basic qualitative research concepts, sharing qualitative data from interviews and field observations, and presenting completed research studies. This web-based site also affords qualitative researchers the potential avenue to share their reusable learning resources for all interested parties to use.

Lots of cool links in the pdf on qualitative research on Youtube – videos on introduction to and overview of qual research, data generation and collection and reporting of findings.

YouTube and Ethnography – check out ChinaSmack  which has hot internet stories, pictures, & videos in China.

Cynthia Russell, a professor at The University of Tennessee Health Science Center, has set up what’s probably the first Qualitative Research resource based on a wiki. Of the 20 journals she has linked to, only 3 offer free access:

Free Access Journals:

• Forum: Qualitative Social Research – online journal designed to promote discussion and cooperation among qualitative researchers from different countries and social science disciplines. 3 issues/year.
• International Journal of Qualitative Methods – the journal’s goals are to advance the development of qualitative methods, and to disseminate methodological knowledge to the broadest possible community of academics, students, and professionals who undertake qualitative research. 4 issues/year.
• The Qualitative Report – a peer-reviewed, on-line journal devoted to writing and discussion of and about qualitative, critical, action, and collaborative inquiry and research. 4 issues/year.

Case in point for an Open Access movement in this field??

We’re now working with another tech company on a research project which will include blogging and the use of twitter for both participants and researchers who are located all over the world.  Some issues we’re grappling with:

• how much coaching and of what kind is required for those participants who are not actively using blogs or twitter; or even those who don’t have 24/7 access to the internet?
• the balance between being broad or narrow in our focussing of the space – the issue here is we don’t want to lose out on spontaneity, and yet we do have a research agenda we need to meet
• also the balance between an informal space and a formal space;  data-collection vs. data collation
• how do we guide the content without biasing participants – would intermittent telephone calls be useful?  home visits where the benefit could be that as observers, if we see something interesting and we say take a quick pic and point out to respondents that this is the sort of thing she could be blogging – would that bias the research?
• the balance between allowing respondents/participants to literally ‘own’ the space vs. our curating it so it becomes more ‘usable’ for the client, and works as a reporting format too
• linked to the above point – should it become a presentation deck for the Client (and hence neat ‘n pretty ) or is the Client willing to take the risk of letting it emerge as it does in its natural flow?
• how do you encourage participation between participants – should we? Would an open discussion page work?

Hmmm. More issues and questions we should be asking? Experiences? Opinions?

Thought I’d share something we worked on last year – almost at the same time Twitter came into its own. and before we thought up Twitter for Ethnography.

We spent some time developing an SMS-Blog research prototype with Srinivas Mogalapalli at Netcore (Rajesh Jain’s company), built upon the MyToday SMS platform.

This was a module in a larger research project among youth, designed to meet the following broad objectives to:

• access and connect to consumer learning and conversations around the patterns for both one-hit fads and enduring trends
• capture insights in the following areas – lifestyle, fashion, relationships, careers, music, technology (gaming, mobile, internet) consumption/retail, entertainment.
• engage customers in ongoing conversations with us
• prototype new formats for research using mobile and internet environments

The research process was designed to include the following modules:

Living Diaries
Focus Groups
Personal Inventory/Character sketches
Virtual Ethnography β

Massive changes in the way youth live their lives today, provide the opportunity to augment traditional qualitative research methodologies. To understand where youth is going, new dynamic, flexible, responsive research approaches are required that more effectively capture their attention. Combining conventional methods like focus groups with methods borrowed from ethnography (that include contextual inquiry with the youth in their personal spaces), will allow us to explore their personal spaces and generate a range of possibilities for deeper dives into their minds and spaces.

We will target a) leading-edge segment of college students and young working people, who are ‘ahead of their times’, differentiated from bleeding-edge consumers, who tend to be atypical, mavens and sometimes a little over the edge. And b) regular upscale consumers to assess brand equity in specific.

This research process will adopt the target group’s own culture-of-use (SMS, MMS, Internet), both to get closer to them and speak their language, and to enhance flows of information.

The objectives of the Virtual Ethnography β module were to:

a. To capture real-time, real-life moments and thoughts as they occur – both written and visual. None of the other research techniques delivers this level of spontaneity, immediacy and ‘realness’ in responses.

b. To test this system out as a prototype or precursor to further assessing how we can make effective use of a networked panel in the belief that it will greatly enhance the way you listen to and engage with your consumers, as you will have access to the information as it flows in.

c. Long-term, we would like to help build, and facilitate making continuous consumer conversations possible. These could also be used further as a playground for new ideas, testing solutions, feedback mechanisms.

The Process and Tools:

We will use SMS, MMS, Blogs and an online email group as the key tools to capture data. 25 participants within the target segment will be recruited per city. They will be at different life-stages and of different gender. They will be required to participate for a period of 2 weeks. There will be three components to this process:

a. SMS-Blog
b. MMS-email/flickr-Blog
c. Blog QOD (question of the day)

We propose the following activities with them within each component:

SMS-Blog

• 4 questions will be sent to each participant every day. The questions will be common to all. These will be quick questions, requiring short immediate responses. We will need to identify close to 60 questions for the two-week duration in conjunction with you. For instance, “where are you now .. who is with you?” or “ did you think of sex today? what triggered the thought?” or “what 3 words best describe why you listen to music” or “take a picture that will show us where you are now and send it to us” or “how would you describe your mood right now?”

• Their responses will be automagically pushed onto a Blog set up on WordPress. Each participant and question/answer will have a unique identifier code which will allow us to read the data separately by segment, and by question.

• Blog categories will be built as the data comes in with the help of tags; demographic categories will be pre-defined as per the recruitment criteria.

• At this stage, we recommend that the participants cannot directly publish on the blog, rather they use SMS to publish to it. This is to keep biases in responses out of the research process.

MMS-Email/Flickr-Blog:

We will ask them to send in pictures to a common Gmail/Flickr account, with 6-10 word descriptors for each image. A private group at Flickr will be opened, where these pictures will be posted. These pictures and tags will be sucked back into the Blog.

Blog Question of the Day (QOD):

For the two weeks, we will have one question of the day. We will post the question on the Blog and send out the link to the group. Their responses can be captured as comments at that post. The questions will typically require longer responses than the SMS questions and will provide us rich data in a very easy format. We could even run some quick opinion polls at the Blog. While they will be asked to comment for each of these questions, we will ensure that they cannot see each others’ comments to ensure that the research process isn’t biased by one comment influencing another. Each commenter would have to drop in their respondent code, so the comments can be sorted by segment.

Unfortunately, although we got the prototype for this up and running, we couldn’t really put it into actual field research then for reasons that had little to do with this module.

Am now wondering what refinements it needs – and would love to hear your own experiences of using the target audience’s “cultures of use” (mobile phones, sms, social media in this case) as a research tool. Do drop in your thoughts and suggestions please

vs

Great piece on Social Learning titled Minds on Fire: Open Education, the Long Tail, and Learning 2.0 by John Seely Brown and Richard P. Adler. The supercool text illustrations are by Susan E. Haviland.

Some snippets I really enjoyed:

What do we mean by “social learning”? Perhaps the simplest way to explain this concept is to note that social learning is based on the premise that our understanding of content is socially constructed through conversations about that content and through grounded interactions, especially with others, around problems or actions. The focus is not so much on what we are learning but on how we are learning.

There is a second, perhaps even more significant, aspect of social learning. Mastering a field of knowledge involves not only “learning about” the subject matter but also “learning to be” a full participant in the field.

In a traditional Cartesian educational system, students may spend years learning about a subject; only after amassing sufficient (explicit) knowledge are they expected to start acquiring the (tacit) knowledge or practice of how to be an active practitioner/professional in a field.⁹ But viewing learning as the process of joining a community of practice reverses this pattern and allows new students to engage in “learning to be” even as they are mastering the content of a field. This encourages the practice of what John Dewey called “productive inquiry”—that is, the process of seeking the knowledge when it is needed in order to carry out a particular situated task.

Although this article has been written in the context of education, there are some great learnings for researchers, ethnographers and for business too. One of the greatest challenges and often a dilemma is how to leverage social tools into research and marketing that would create a shift from a much hyped must-do model based on explicit learning (yeah – lets go build a social network or lets start a Facebook community for our brand) to a more intuitive method grounded in tacit knowledge and real experience.

One reason why we believe researchers experimenting with these tools should immerse themselves in using them first, one reason why we believe all brand managers should build their own social media toolkits through actual experience! One of the problems with this is the time commitments required for these personal explorations, which could then morph into professional insights. I cannot emphasise more the importance of being touched at a personal level for developing a learning-to-be mindset. That’s what good Learning Journeys can accomplish.

There’s a discussion on at the anthrodesign group around how best to approach a diary project. An excerpt from the initial query:

“We’ll be fielding a diary study trying to understand people’s initial experiences with a new mobile phone, particularly understanding the set up experience and the first few days of use. We are interested in what they are doing, barriers/successes, feelings during the process. “

There have been some thoughts and ideas around using voicemail, online diaries, digital voice-recording. Voicemail and digital voice-recording may present problems in analysis I feel. Also, would the participants be comfortable with it?

Something I feel that could work, and here’s what I sent:

Have you thought of using something like Twitter for this? You could set up a private group or channel there – where you could ask participants to send in short (140 character) messages. These updates could be either via SMS from phone, IM, or web-based. Advantages – you would capture feedback in real time as it happens, if youth is your target group then you’re enabling them to utilise their own culture of use (sms/IM) and hence a more natural and spontaneous capture and flow of responses. A few times a day you could send out specific questions. Here’s a link to a hack for this.

Likewise, if you need visual representation too – a private Flickr group could be set up too – and there are tools like Shozu to upload pics straight from your phone onto Flickr with one click!

An alternative to this is an SMS/MMS to Blog option, which is more controlled – where you could set categories like cribs/delights etc. Send out short questions over the week to participants – their responses come into a blog site via SMS or MMS. You could also consider a more detailed QOD – Question of the Day – if required, where they log into the blog and post their responses.

Last year, we had set up a prototype for an SMS-Blog system for trends research – unfortunately, the client – a youth TV channel wasn’t quite ready to run with it at that point in time. I’d have loved to have used Twitter itself even then, however, we didn’t have a short code for India specifically and hence, would have been too expensive for users. Now we do, and am eager to test it out as a research tool!

Check this post by Leisa Reichelt – Guerrilla Techniques – Does inexpensive research have to be ‘quick & dirty’ where she raises a “whole lotta questions” about using tools such as Twitter for research – my favourite question there is “Are we getting to the point where, perhaps, we can do better research outside of the lab than inside it?”

Any thoughts on how we could refine our research methods and the social tools available today for more formal research? I don’t think it’s really about being ‘quick and dirty’ – the real value is in being able to use these tools to set up long-term and robust research solutions that encourage participation in real-life and real-time situations. This is one of our key areas of focus at Mosoci and we keep experimenting!

There’s nothing like blog friends to make you feel guilty about ignoring your blog!!!!! Stuart first slaps his own wrist makes his affirmations a couple of days ago, Aparna pings me today with a one-liner in her sign-off on a quick chat we had today:

“ok gotto go now – will talk more about the project later…btw I wish your blog would have more than just links for the day

Gulp. I’ll be back soon. Just been crazy busy with a large motivational research on condoms (Shubhangi and I, along with out Client, also a qualitative researcher, now feel we have done everything, and can talk to anyone about anything!!!). Quick trips to Hyderabad and Calcutta.

Right after that, without a day’s breather, we were off to Delhi on a recky visit for a Learning Journey we’re hosting in Mumbai and Delhi, for a group of health-care professionals from the US, early January. It’s quite challenging organizing both content and logistics for 7 full days. Visits to NGO’s and ayurveda centres and scouting venues and meeting documentary film-makers in 3 days of recky. And to rural Uttar Pradesh.

Have lots to share on my visit to two villages in the Ghaziabad district (the amazing pic above is captured by Shubhangi) – but for now, just this one. My field person there – Mithilesh – who I met after a pretty long while, reminded that the winner of Star Voice of India, Ishmeet, had been a participant in an ethnographic study I was doing in Chandigarh many years ago. This was a project on Sources of Cool among Youth, for MTV. In fact, she also reminded me that he had actually taken us to his college and hangout joints to meet his friends, as part of the study. I hadn’t made the connection till then.

Heh!

• Punk Planning: From the heart, not the head – Research in Asia

  Bookmarked to read later in detail and share my views with Charles Firth who’s had some bad experiences researching in Asia, and raises some interesting issues around the impact culture has on qualitative research methods. We’ve had to train our ‘foreign’ clients often on our own methods to go beyond the surface, and not just follow discussion guides and research templates created elsewhere without customizing them.

  (tags: asianresearch ethnography focus groups planning qualitativeresearch researchinnovation user research)

It’s been a while since I visited Reshma Anand’s blog on qualitative research …. and realised I was missing out on so many good conversations! In one of her posts, she asks:

“Are qualitative researchers – an inclusive lot – when it comes to the treatment of ‘Outliers’ or Do we banish the stray thought that we hear in research – as a maverick of sorts….’non representative’ of the audience at large?

I read this post on Helen’s blog some days ago, that set me thinking. Is there a subconscious bias prevalent within the discipline of qual research – a bias that favors the majority such that we lay greater emphasis on the thoughts expressed by ‘many’ vis-a-vis those expressed by a ‘few’?”

It took me back many many years. To the late 80′s. Sometimes it pays to be a qualitative researcher for almost 20 years . Unfortunately, I couldn’t find images of the brands I am talking about as they were 20 years ago!

When Nirma, an indigenous brand of low-cost washing powder was launched – it opened up a whole new market at the bottom of the pyramid. Hindustan Unilever Limited (then Hindustan Lever Limited or HLL), who was reigning supreme in the overall washing powder and detergents category then, launched Wheel to carve out its own market and eat into Nirma’s share (although they had Sunlight powder then in that segment). IMRB (the company I worked with for 10 years from 1989-1998) was called in to conduct qualitative research in order to find chinks in Nirma’s armour.

It is to the credit of Priya Tandan, my first boss, and the lady who really taught me so much of my basics in qualitative research, who had the courage and integrity to report in one comment she heard among so many in the numerous focus groups she conducted on the project. And this comment was the only negative murmur she heard against Nirma, which otherwise seemed to be a godsend in every way – that it sometimes led to a burning sensation on the hands, when being used.

Priya then reported this to the Client and their Agency, and it led to one of the most successful advertising campaigns of the time – one of those with a real Big Idea – where a woman is shown dramatically rejecting the yellow (Nirma) powder, saying “door ho jao meri nazron se – maine maangi thi safaii, tune di haathon ki jalan” ( transliteration – get away from my sight — I had asked for something to help me clean, instead you gave me a product that burns my hands). This then became one of the biggest barriers to Nirma usage and a strong negative association with the brand even among its users, which was played back in research after research, for years to come. And Wheel and Nirma were then soon fighting neck-to-neck on market share.

That soap opera is done for now, but the lesson I learnt was tremendous! I often recall this example when doing my analysis – and remind myself to look for the inconsistencies and not just the consistencies. And I often tell the story and play it back to Clients who question me about “how MANY said that?”!