- In this movie we're gonna discuss
a research method called ethnography.
Ethnography is used to understand the connection
between human behavior and culture,
such as "how do people behave in a given environment."
Let's consider people and environment for a moment.
What we're talking about here is context:
a particular group of people connected together
by a shared social, cultural, or environmental experience.
Now this could be mechanics in a garage,
teachers in a classroom, senior citizens
at an ATM machine, runners in a marathon,
or young students using the internet at school.
These are all specific contexts
that ethnography can help study.
Ethnography is a qualitative research method
that relies on the researcher to put him or herself
in the mindset of the user and the context being studied.
Think about the people closest to you for a minute.
They might be your friends, family, co-workers,
and think about all their varying behaviors,
their likes, dislikes, and attitudes.
Now, think about trying to put yourself in their shoes
to try to understand why they behave the way they do.
That's a pretty overwhelming thought, right?
This is called empathy and it's the key benefit
of conducting ethnographic research.
Empathy is understanding another person's situation
from their perspective.
By placing yourself in their shoes,
or natural environment, you're able to better
understand the potential reasons for their behavior.
And this is particularly useful
when you're searching for an explanation.
It can be difficult to understand why
or how someone behaves.
As Margaret Mead says, "What people say,
what people do, and what people say they do
are entirely different things."
To understand this better let's consider a broad example
by looking at a basic piece of quantitative research.
45% of people are unhappy with their current employment.
So, what do we know?
A lot of people don't like their jobs.
But we don't have any idea why.
And ethnography, like all qualitative research,
is graded on covering "why."
So let's start out by doing some interviews
with people who claim to be unhappy at their job.
And these are some of the things we find out:
Now this information is great,
but I think we can get even deeper
into the problem with ethnography.
Now let's see what happens when we use
ethnographic observations of the work environment.
By observing the unhappy workers
within the organization for a week,
I saw how they behaved and interacted.
And this is what I observed: there are no windows
or natural light inside of the office,
there seem to be too many useless meetings,
workers often appeared bored and frustrated,
low-level employees had several managers to answer to,
and there was little teamwork or collaboration.
So by using ethnography, we were able to discover more
about what it's like to be a worker at this organization,
we gained empathy for the workers,
and having this empathy sheds new light
on why they're unhappy.
So one of the big ideas we're pointing to here
is that ethnography helps to uncover
why something is happening.
And if we apply the same thinking to a design problem,
it can help answer why we need a new website,
why consumers are no longer trusting our brand message,
or how we can help someone's experience
of navigating the city.
It all comes back to gaining empathy
for the end-user and their environment.
The other big idea is that by focusing
on the user's natural environment,
you discover unknown opportunities.
By watching workers in the company
we discovered that there's no teamwork or collaboration.
Maybe if projects are structured differently
more workers could form connections,
and maybe even friendships, with each other
while still being productive.
This could make the work environment a happier place.
Ethnography uses a variety of tactics
to observe people in their natural environment.
Ethnography helps to understand why problems exist
as well as discover possible solutions to solve them.