What is Digital Ethnography?
Photo by Mink Mingle on Unsplash
What is "digital ethnography"?
This is a broad answer. Ethnographic research is loosely defined as qualitative research or "the study and systematic recording of human cultures." If I can be allowed to fine tune this a bit, I say that "digital ethnography" is a method of using digital tools to connect with users to learn more about their life.
What's important with this type of research is that it aims to give you an unbiased look at how people live their lives, issues or challenges they face, or how they view the world or even how they use technology. This type of exploratory research is usually done at the beginning of design in order to understand deeper motivations as well as the contextual or real life use of a product.
Types of Digital ETHNOGRAPHIES
Digital ethnography methodologies can range from in-depth interviews, diaries of user tasks, screen shares of someone’s working process or even social data analysis. It can be structured with moderation from a professional interviewer or unmoderated leaving the participant to answer freely.
There is much debate around moderated vs unmoderated; which is better and when to use them. Moderated digital ethnography can be something like a remote screen share with someone sharing their desk or working environment or a list of steps IT professionals go through to buy a tech product. In this method, you have the opportunity to ask follow up questions in order to clarify a behavior. Moderated research is done quite a bit for usability testing towards the middle and end of a design.
An unmoderated example would be asking users to record their task completely on their own. There might be initial instruction but there is minimal interaction and respondents are left to freely respond (as well as interpret the ask). Unmoderated research is best at getting a big picture idea of how someone lives or how they complete a certain task without influencing their answer. My thoughts are that unmoderated research is best done at the beginning stages of design in order to get rich audience insights as well as post-design in order to consistently optimize for a better experience.
Digital Ethnography tools
With the rise of digital research tools, ethnographic approaches have been enriched (or denigrated depending on who you ask). On the positive side, digital tools are seen as helpful to the research process as they ideally give you an easily deployable and less biased view of user behaviors since there is no intrusion or interviewer present. The opposition states that digital tools only give you a superficial glimpse into the lives of your audience as people live multi-media and multi-dimensional lives.
Social listening is a tool that falls under this category. You can gather a lot from what people do and say on social media. For instance, while working for a restaurant brand I found that fans were so loyal they would go to bat and defend the brand against competitors on social media. They would even talk specifically about ingredients and how they were superior. This led to a bold creative idea for the brand campaign that involved brand fanatics to help support the brand's ingredient-focused messaging.
User testing services like UserTesting.com while typically used for usability tests or post-design feedback, can also be used for ethnography and to understand the mindset and day-in-the-life of a user. You can easily and quickly set up a test and instead of asking them to give feedback on website, or ask them to go through a decision process like deciding on a hotel. This is essentially ethnography since it is unstructured and observatory on someone's decision making.
Don't Forget the "Why"
Of course there are some downfalls with digital tools as you don’t often know the deeper reason or the “why” behind someone’s social activity. All in all, it’s a good initial process to gather information, competitive data, hypothesis about media motivations etc.
However if you’re in early design phases or planning a product launch with limited understanding of your users, I’m keen on in-person contextual inquiries or field visits. With this kind of research, you can see the bigger picture of someone's experience with your product. It also allows many follow-ups for lots of rich learning. Interviews with actual users will provide your teams with information they didn’t even know they needed.
While planning a launch for Toyota Yaris, we visited the homes of sub-compact buyers to get a glimpse into their home life and interests in order to plan for a digital campaign. We knew that fancy car purchases were not important to these individuals but we didn’t know why. So going into their homes, learning more about their lives and what was important to them, helped us realize that "why". And what we didn’t expect and never could have guessed was the depth of this segment's hobbies. From antique candy machine collecting to owning every game system ever made, we discovered the Yaris driver would much rather spend money on their passions and hobbies than a fancy car. We understood the why. This information was invaluable to the client from a feature perspective (highlight storage spaces & pockets) as well as inspiring to creative teams (campaign with video games and geeky celebrities).
All in all, digital ethnographies can be a powerful way to analyze consumer behavior but like any research, you must pay mind to the right methodology for the right research goal....and make sure you get face time with your audience to get at the deeper "why."