What are ethnographic interviews?

Ethnography is the study of people’s lives: work, family, relations, religions and habits (UCL, 2018). It stems from anthropology which is the comparative study of human societies in order to understand what it means to be a human (UCL, 2018).

Ethnographic interviews have three stages:

• Early interviews: exploratory in nature and focused on gathering domain knowledge.
• Middle interviews: using data collected previously, more open-ended questions and domain-specific questions can be asked to ‘connect the dots’.
• Later interviews: confirm previously identified patterns and making fine adjustments to assumptions. These tie up the ends.

A key feature of an ethnographic interview is that it takes place in the environment of the user. The reasoning for this is so that it is clear where the app would be used and so any obvious limitations of using an app in this area can be understood. The environment also gives secrets about the types of things the user do in it away, for example for app for a market would be researched in a market where there could be a large queue of people outside of the chip shop and a smaller one by the handbag shop – does this suggest that more people come to the market to buy chips than handbags?

Interview questions

Questions should be very broad and not fixed or leading. The reasoning for this is that the interviewer should not know enough about the domain to be able to even think about specific questions to ask. The subject of what you’re conducting the ethnographic interviews for shouldn’t even be mentioned in the interview, or at least not explicitly.

Not using a fixed set of questions is also advisable. You should probably go in with an idea about the kind of things you want to ask and the topics you want to cover, but to help make the interviewee feel more at ease and to catch any additional data, the interview should run more like a conversation and you should try and expand on some answers a little. The whole idea of ethnographic interviewing is that the interviewer doesn’t know a lot about the domain to begin with, so it’s very important to capture as much domain knowledge as possible.

Story-telling and asking for a ‘show and tell’ can be good. Story-telling enables the interviewee to give a personal reasoning for an opinion which can be vital information that you don’t get from asking a set of fixed question. In order to get the stories you need to get the conversation flowing. The ‘show and tell’ could come as a result of the story-telling. The interviewee could take you to a place where something happened or show you something that’s wrong. This is also vital information to help as it will help you design a better solution.

What to find out about

It’s important to ensure that the user isn’t the designer at this stage – the idea is just to go in there and find out the following about the user:

• Their goals: what the user aims to do.
• Their system experience: how the user feels whilst using the ‘system’ – what they enjoy, what they dislike, what they’d change.
• Their workflow: how using the ‘system’ or ‘product’ fits into their day.

Goals should be the main focus – it’s important to know why the user wants to do something before a solution can be designed for it. Once the key goals and pain points of a current system have been identified, it is possible to design a solution.

Other things to enquire about are:

• Processes: the order in which the interviewee completes tasks.
• Occurrences and recurrences: what is done regularly, what is not, what’s done daily, weekly or monthly?
• Exceptions: what is a typical routine and what is not? What are the exceptions to the rules?
• Avoidance: what do you prefer not to do?
• Motivation: what do you enjoy most about an activity or a product? What encourages you to do or use that thing?

Conclusion

Ethnographic interviews form the very first stage of the user-centred design process. They should focus on gaining domain knowledge from the people that use the domain and then this can be used to branch out in the future.

References

Cooper, A., Reimann, R., Cronin, D. & Noessel, C. (2014) About Face The Essentials of Interaction Design, 4th Edition. Indianapolis, Indiana: Wiley

Ucl.ac.uk. (n.d.). Anthropology and ethnography. [online] Available at: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/why-we-post/about-us/what-is-anthropology [Accessed 8 Nov. 2018].