Finding the "Right People" for Exploratory Research

Recently, a number of design researchers have posted to the anthrodesign yahoo group with questions and comments about using recruiters. While we use recruiters when time is short or when the research topics are very well understood, exploratory ethnography usually does not use an outside recruiting agency.

Likewise, a tight screener is usually not the right tool to kick off exploratory field research. Here's why: finding the right people to talk to—that is, setting up the sampling parameters—is a complex task best accomplished while in the field, and it should be tweaked on the fly and not set in stone before the research.

This causes clients some consternation, so it might be helpful to review why and how ethnographers do their particular brand of field-based sampling. Ethnographic sampling is critical for exploratory research. It is especially important where cultural differences require significant bridging, as between a global consumer product company and Chinese consumers, like these folks outside my favorite Beijing hutong courtyard hotel, for example.

Finding people to talk to and be with is always part of the research process and thinking and working hard at discovering who to talk to is critical. But to be clear, using an outside recruiter takes important learnings out of the field research process and risks not going to the right places and not finding the right people. Just finding people is only one side of the research coin. There is another side.

The other side is finding the right contexts in which to interview and observe. Do recruiters identify contexts for us? Without knowing the range of contexts in which people do (or don't do) the things we are interested in, ethnographic research is epistemologically vapid and frankly uninterpretable. Meaning comes from context, not from words, after all. We have to sample contexts and people.

Sampling in exploratory work means being clear about the unit of analysis (Is it the person? The group? What kind of group?). And it means being clear about the Big N, the universe of units that comprise the domain from which we select a sample, the small n. In exploratory work (Mike Agar calls exploratory work the learning modality as opposed to the testing modality), we often don't know enough to decide just what the heck the unit of analysis should be; nor can we be sure about the boundaries of the sampled universe, the Big N. Both have to be understood in testing research; exploratory research is about bounding the universe and determining the appropriate unit of analysis, which by definition you don't quite know until you go into the field. Hence, my discomfort with recruiters within the exploratory mode.

Dominique Desjeux at U. Paris IV has a lot to say about this. He says that we get into discussions like this one precisely because our footing on what he calls the échelle d'observation, the scale of observation, determines what we can know and how we can know it. He says it in French—zut alors— but its pretty clear: ethnographers are standing on the small group échelle, market researchers are often properly interested in the individual échelle, as are most psychologists.

We all know that even the tightest pre-field screener can trip us up. A client may know with certainty that the right person buys only organic vegetables at Trader Moe's and listens only to Prairie Barn Companion on non-commercial radio. We screen for that, and make a home visit only to find Lady GaGa blaring from an MP3 player and a big bag of crispy-fried-fake-cheese-product-snax on the kitchen counter. Are we in the wrong house? Is this the wrong person? We don't know, yet. You get the idea. For exploratory work, your sample has to flex with the discovered contexts on the ground if you don't know the Big N and if you aren't yet clear on the unit of analysis. When you ARE clear, tighten up your screeners and get on the phone with your trusted recruter.

Don't take my word for it. Read Michael Maltz, the former editor of a quantitative journal of criminology, whose article on the declining significance of significance makes a strong case for working in both the inductive-learning mode and in the deductive-means-based-testing mode. He doesn't reject parametric sampling. He wants to expand the research tool kit. Its a great read, and worth the download:

It is my contention that we have been laboring, we business and design ethnographers, under a biz-research paradigm grown of the American MBA and an individual-psychometric toolkit. The biz paradigm too often seeks "efficiency" at the expense of well grounded exploratory work that might challenge received notions of the right person. This paradigm rarely worries about sampling contexts. The biz-psych paradigm has its place but it doesn't offer useful tools for exploratory field-based work.

So, we have to understand where we are coming from. Testing mode? Exploratory mode? On which échelle do we stand? I hope we fieldworkers are always challenging just who the right people (and contexts) are, thus challenging the testing-mode sampling parameters whose lucky failure so often leads to exploratory fieldwork. The wrong people, the outliers, the early adopters, the queers, the club kids, the differently-abled, the workers in the back of the fast-food shop and the folks who eat fake-cheese-product-snax often teach us a lot more than the putative right people, anyway. At least for me, but I'm usually stuck in the messy, hard-to-explain ethnographic exploratory modality. (Not that I don't dust off SPSS from time to time, its just not usually my échelle!)

The nature of ethnographic sampling challenges ethnographers like me to be clear about what we are doing, and thus to do a better job explaining what échelle we are trained to work from!

Zut alors!

Google in China: Ethnographic Perspectives

Lower-income Chinese people—perhaps one should say "lower-income students and their families"—care deeply about access to the Internet. (The photo is from a lower-income home of a student and her parents in a small town in the Southeast of China). But it seems Google is not a core part of the desire to be connected, to learn, and participate in the Internet. Google has not met its potential in China, and now, after an encounter with some security "problems" (to put it mildly) they are making noises about packing up and moving out.

The recent flap about Google's presence in China is, indeed, more than a flap. Google claims that their servers were violated, along with some others. The idea that some official entity got to mucking about not only with Google but with some US corporate property in cyberspace seems not to be part of the Chinese discussion, but news about Google's unhappiness with Chinese censorship certainly is. To be sure, the security issue is an important one, and censorship is, too. But another issue is the difference bewteen Internet use in China and in the US (and elsewhere).

Google is not, presently, a good fit for China. By now, most folks who are interested in Internet in China are aware of the power of MSN and QQ. Not everyone sees this as a basic difference in communication practice. It might be easy to pin the difference on "cultural difference," but this begs the question of where that difference comes from. Tricia Wang lays out the issues in a lengthy and important post on her blog. Her comments neatly summarize the experience of our research teams (and my personal experience living from time to time in Beijing and here and there) over the past ten or so years. Tyler Rooker at his 中关村 blog has some pithy remaks about Google's hubris that are worth a read, too). Chinese sites like Baidu (for search) and TuDou (for video) are simply more relevant in China.

The differences among Google and other web tools in China extends to mobile phone use, too. It is is related to the pragmatic constraints of access, charges for phone and Internet use, and the services Google offers. Here are some of the issues (covered well by Tricia; I add a bit to her list, here):

• Google doesn't provide access to the rich media content that other sites do.
• The name "Google" is not well understood people aren't sure how to spell it.
• Google has not tapped into the sense of national pride as other domestic IT products have done. Consider the line of peripherals and monitors made by the "aigo" company. Aigo sounds just like "aiguo," which means love of country or patriotism (爱国).
  
• Google is not a player in instant messaging. QQ, the biggest player in instant messaging in China (and, probably, in the world) is much more than an instant messaging system. Its a game platform, it is always integrated in Chinese mobile phones, and it has brand exensions into cute, cuddly products in QQ stores. It has lent its name to a small automobile, the QQ car, which is, by the way, very 可爱的, very "cute" (sounds like QQ). Nothing wrong with a little alliterative fun in IT.
• Google is not really a player in the mobile space in China, where asynchronous communication is cheaper and preferred. Mobile phones are nearly ubiquitous regardless of income. Few people talk much on their mobile phones. People get their business done quickly on the phone, unless they are rich. Ordinary people text plenty, but minutes are expensive. Text and QQ are not. Where is Google?
  
• The competition is working in another space in which Google is inactive: buying and selling little low-cost goodies related to games, identity, and just plain fun. QQ has developed Qcoin, a virtual currency that is so successful that the Chinese government is stepping in to regulate folks who trade in it. (QQ says Qcoin is a commodity, not a currency, btw).
  
• Google makes sense for richer, post-graduate people; there is enormous interest in the Internet as an educational resource but for lower-income people but Google is off the map. A decent desktop is certainly not off the map, even for folks of humble means (like the household in the photograph). IT matters to families who care about their children's future; Google is not seen as a partner in that regard. Why not?

Google has plenty of creative dreamers, but it seems they don't look into the deeper nexus of constraints and incentives that shape and direct practices in different national contexts. I'm sure there are plenty of people at Google who "get it," but it has been my experience that too few in the IT community have a clear understanding of the broadly cultural (and structural) differences in IT practices. A few years ago I met a high-level executive of a very large IT firm who was completely unaware of QQ, of how MSN and QQ are the preferred way of communicating on the Internet in China. How many in Silicon Valley are similarly uninformed?

Tricia Wang is quite correct. It would be a pity if Google were to give up on China, and it would help neither China nor Google nor the future of the conversation about Internet freedom and privacy if they were to give up the ship in the Middle Kingdom.

Is Immersion Ethnography?

Is immersion ethnography? The answer: "sort of." Does it matter? That depends, too.

Our pal and colleague, Hy Mirampolsky, has written quite a good book that introduces ethnography to marketers. He calls his book Ethnography for Marketers: A Guide to Consumer Immersion (Sage Publications, 2006). For Hy, immersion means ethnography. P&G, which uses ethnographic methods (as do most major globla players in the FMCG sector), gets their researchers to interact directly with their consumers, and it has helped. Nigel Hollis, at the mega-research shop, Milward Brown, offered this candid and thoughtful assessment from a market researcher's perspective:

An article in Strategy Magazine on the turnaround led by P&G CEO A.G. Lafley reports that as part of the “internal revolution” at P&G, research methodologies were re-examined along with operational structure and processes. Much of P&G’s traditional research, in which the marketer plays the role of objective witness, has been replaced with programs which bring marketers directly in touch with consumers and their everyday lives. Jim Stengel, global marketing officer at P&G, calls these programs “consumer immersion experiences.” In the name of consumer immersion, P&G marketers are spending time working in shops in Mexico and conducting in-home observations of U.S. pet owners.

He suggests that some think this approach threatens "traditional" research approaches, and he debunks that idea quite well. Furthermore, some of the folks at P&G, he says, don't like talking about consumers. They would rather talk about (and talk with) people. You count things consumers do, you conduct surveys about them, you observe them. But you don't interact with consumers. You interact with people. Immersion is people focused. That's great.

This discussion seems puzzling for cultural anthropologists, for whom people-centered research, participant observation, and being present in people's lives across a variety of contexts has always been at the core of their research methods, for more than 100 years already. An anthropologist would wonder what the fuss was all about. Then they'd wonder why anthropologists haven't gotten their methodological messages across to the business world as well as they might have.

Some folks—perhaps most—in the marketing world conduct immersion by starting with an agency. The agency does the recruiting. The agency finds the people to hang out with. They make the appointment and pay the respondent. The client shows up,hangs out for a day, interacts, and learns. But starting and stopping there limits the learning that could be had. It may limit the marketer's ability to generalize or to understand the wider context in which people live. And it is not the kind of thing that ethnographers (usually) do.

The limitations start with recruiting. No anthropologist would ever separate the recruiting process from the field research process, unless they are really under the gun for a rapid-assessment kind of field trip.

Anthropologists want the first-hand experience (and often, frustration) that comes from meeting new respondents in person, on the phone, or on the Internet. They visit the respondent's neighborhood, workplace, or school first. They make sure that people see them, ask them what they are doing, hanging around. They look for opportunities explain their research interest, and to find out what people think about it. Often, design ethnographers and applied anthropologists engage their respondents quite directly in the research process, as collaborators (see Stull and Schensule, 1987, Collaborative Research and Social Change, or any of the many articles on collaborative design).

The other limitation to watch out for is timing. Is the immersion on a weekday? During a long weekend? Does the pre-recruited sample allow the serendipitous participation in special times, when grandmother comes to visit, during a birthday or an anniversary? After all, special times bring things to the surface that are otherwise hidden. Screenwriters know this; just watch The Wedding Planner or Father of the Bride. So-called normal daily life is a great start but there should be a space for some interviewing during special, ritual times and some space for unexpected discoveries and unexpected meetings, comings, and goings, too.

Ethnographers hang out and interact in real contexts, but they seek natural contexts for ethnographic interviews, as well, just as Jo Yung is doing at a Chinese Starbucks, above.

The immersion that Hy talks about, and the immersion that design ethnographers and anthropologists conduct, do indeed follow from the same idea that drove P&G to (re)discover immersion as a way to understand consumers: get as close as you can to someone else's reality, stay experience-near, and don't rely only on data like surveys that are, as they say, experience-distant.

Being systematic about immersion in this way is what anthropologists do, and there is a hefty body of literature to guide researchers to a better understanding of the lives of people that we ordinarily don't get close to. Use immersion as a start. But follow up, take some time, and explore the possibilities of doing some of your own recruiting. The usual concerns of any researcher—questions about sampling people and contexts, the trustworthiness of the findings, and all the rest, matter a great deal. Just dropping in on a pre-selected respondent for a day is a great start but the research will matter more if the fieldworkers have a bit more time, can assess on their own their sampling needs as those emerge from the field encounter, and if the fieldworker includes some focused interviewing in the mix.

McCafé: a chink in the QSR armor?

Oh yes, McD is pulling out all the stops for McCafé. (Pre-launch photo on right from Detroit, I think).

And QSR observers (more accurately, one consultant/columnist at QSR magazine) are seeing an opportunity in this for other players, citing "new product launches" that steer away from the "core" business as opportunities for competition to make a big play and boost their own comps.

That's true. But it doesn't explain why the opportunity is there. Understanding why the opportunity is there suggests that not all deviations from the "core" will fail nor will all deviations produce an opportunity for competition to boost their own same-store year-over-year (comp) sales.

McCafe, by the way, has been around for years. We just have not seen it in the USA. According to my friends in Argentina (from whence all the South American and, I think, a few Caribbean stores are managed and quite independently of the mother ship, in many ways and contrary to popular opinion) the concept of a McCafé as an in-store add-on originated in Latin America. Free-standing McCafé's have been in China for years (and probably elsewhere but I don't care about and rarely travel to continental Europe--I'm a Swede and a Chinese dude, these days, and don't know nuthin about birthin' no McCafe's on the continent).

In South America, McCafe is a small, clean, pastry-filled delight, and at flagship stores, its more nifty than the most upscale pastry place you can imagine. But with better lighting, more upscale design, and more high-rollers with their McBooks (no, MacBooks) hanging about and sipping on decent quality coffee.

Franchisees in the USA don't know how to do this, don't have room, and aren't committed to it, despite how the McD Main Shop might like to beat them over the head with the Big Red Book of Franchisee Good Behavior and Legal Leverage.

Now, I'm only talking about McCafé in Southern California, Dallas, and San Francisco (where there are damn few Mickie Dees to begin with). So maybe I'm wrong. But I'm right about one thing: an innovation is not always a chink in the armour. But in this case, McCafé may be a big bloody hole. If I were managing a bunch of Starbucks, I'd be tickled pink. McDonalds is training a generation of junior high kids to like coffee, and they'll be ready for Starbucks when they get a real summer job next year. But, oops, meanwhile McD is getting some dough from those teens that other's aren't getting. So who is winning, now? I wonder.

Maybe somebody should hire an anthropologist to dive into this. (Oh, yes, you know what the trademarks are in this post, so give me a break.) And to hammer the initial point home: the chinks in the QSR armor of the competition only exist when local store execution doesn't deliver the promise, or when the promise doesn't matter to the people who go there. Will new/returning customers who formerly (or putatively) abjure Mickee Dees come back to find an unfamiliar coffee and, perhaps, spills on the floor and staff who are not 100% sold on the new product when they were already feeling odd about going back in there in the first place?

One last thing: anybody see a similarity between McD and MacOS? I sure do. More on that later. Maybe.

The Value of Cribbage: Low Vision and Food Packaging

A couple years ago, The Boeing Company hired us to explore how disabled people experienced airline travel in China, India, Chile, and the USA. (follow the link for video).

The results helped Boeing, and may help airlines (we are talking with them!) but we learned so much about disability that we kept thinking, "How can we leverage that learning for better products for people with disabilities, beyond the air-travel space?" But we were too busy with day-to-day business from our regular clients to work on that question.

Just now, business is slow enough to allow our team to re-visit the issue. Thanks to a cribbage game, I learned just how problematic packaging can be.

I was spending more time with my low-vision friend, Fred, an elderly neighbor with whom I play cribbage when I’m not flitting around doing fieldwork. (I should say, "a quick-witted neighbor who regularly cleans my clock at cribbage, and who I have to ply with a couple glasses of wine just to stay even, let alone beat at this old card game!)

Fred was complaining about food packaging. He couldn’t read the cooking instructions with his expensive CCTV magnifier. Sometimes he couldn’t even find them. That caught my attention because we had been talking, at work, about all the stuff we learned on the Boeing project, and how someone—maybe the someone is our company—should apply some of that to consumer products.

So, at a lunch a few weeks later, my friend Carmen (Carmen the fabulous, by the way) of the Braille Institute sat down with me at lunch (we had met during the Boeing work). I told her about my friend, and asked what she thought about it. Carmen told me the same frustrating story: I think she ended up not cooking at all one night because she couldn't find the cooking instructions on the package!





The package shown here (with a hat-tip to Trader Joe's for their yummy French Toast) has instructions on the spine, and you can't read things on the spine with most CCTV readers--the kind of readers that many low-vision folks have in their homes.

Now, here is a case for universal design if there ever was one. Making packaging better for low-vision consumers makes it better for everyone. New technology like the Kurzweil-NFB reader can help, but to use that tool, you have to know where the text is. And the text likely has to be pretty good contrast (and not printed against a photo or some package-design thing) to work.

But how to get packaged-good manufacturers on board? More regulation would make them bristle (probably) but maybe some collaboration would help them understand that 18,000,000 new 65-year-olds are created every year (or will soon be, according to most demographic experts). Plenty of them—myself, Fred, and Carmen included—will have at least some problems with vision.

Designing answers will take work, collaboration, and shared learning. Lets find out who is up to the task. I'm going to keep playing cribbage with Fred (and, probably, I'll loose more often than I'll win) and I'll bet he will have more stories about how some products just don't work for him, despite the tech he has around the house to make his consumer products usable.

Gansu Micro-Business Meets the Mall: Boiled not Fried

These Gansu guys (who would probably identify as Huizu [回族], Chinese from the West of China who practice Islam) provided us with dinner in a big city in Southwest China's Sichuan Province. I had my hopes up for those yummy wide noodles that are stir-fried with lamb or beef and big chunky vegetables, and maybe a skewer or two of spicy lamb. I kept asking about this dish and that dish, pointing out likely looking delicacies on the menu on the wall.

"Sorry, don't have that."
"How about this one here?"
"Nope, not that either."

These folks were so friendly and the smells from the kitchen were so yummy that I gave up and asked "Okay bring what you have," and Jo (who actually speaks and understands Mandarin, while I only fake it), pointed out to me that they are only allowed to serve boiled foods.

Plenty delicious, but the wall to the right (and out of view here) had such lovely goodies on display that I was a little bit dismayed. Its the same menu that most Huizu restaurants have, anywhere in China. But the offering here was sort of limited. Howcome?

Local government was re-habbing the neighborhood, and won't let this restaurateur have a license for anything but boiled food. No wok, no grilling. Water pollution, we were told; inadequate sewer hook-ups. Next door is a Sportswear mall, brand new, not quite finished. The top floor will have a food court. You can bet that they will have all kinds of food, not just boiled noodles and boiled Jiaoze (佼字）.

Discrimination against minority people is illegal, in China--unconstitutional in fact. But all the world over, discrimination against micro-entrepreneurs seems the order of the day. Too often, the banks and the big developers win, and the small operator makes do. In this case, selling (delicious) boiled noodles and jiaoze, which were more fun to eat, cheaper, and probably fresher than most of the stuff sold in most of the food courts, anyhow.

What color is my drink?

I'm not a big fan of energy drinks. They're loaded with caffeine, and caffeine makes me high. Too high to be alert as these drinks are supposed to make me. However, once in a while I do need to down a can or two in the hope that I'll get something done before crashing.

Caffeinated drinks are a rare item in my fridge, and I've been brand-aware of only one: Red Bull. Its liquid is greenish yellow. Or at least this is the color that I know. And I only came to know its color because of a cocktail I sometimes get: Vodka and Red Bull. But lately a friend of mine gave me a box of Jolt, something I'd never heard of before. As usual, I just drank it right out of the can and the thought of what its color might be has never crossed my mind.

Then one day I poured a can of Jolt out on ice and was greatly surprised that it's blue. BLUE. How would I have know? It made me wonder how we, the consumers, come to know all about the products we use everyday. In the same manner, you would never know the color of ketchup because Heinz has decided to pack it in opaque reddish bottles. Wait, if you hadn't experienced ketchup before, how would you know the bottle's color is that of the sauce?

I've learned a new phrase today from a computer science friend: Cognitive blind-spots. I think these are things we might overlook because they fall through the holes of our cognition. There are a lot of packaging forms out there that obscure the product inside. The packages serve as a vessel to deliver the product to our senses (not to us, but to our cognition) OR block the product from some certain sense. Think about the yucky bitter medicine you take, masked by sweet sugary coating.

I'm just pondering about the possibility of not knowing the look of things I put in my mouth. In case of medicine, it's by choice, but in case of Jolt, I'd rather know it upfront than have alien tongue.

Action Steps in Printer Use: Design Flaws for Visually (Un)impaired

After lunch with Carmen Aplegren, the intrepid publicist at the Braille Institute of America (and owner of Gal Pal Val, the amazing guide-hund), I realized we have a ton of stuff from our research about how design doesn't take into account the visual needs of users like me, or like Carmen, who sees a bit less of the world through her eyes (but more in other ways) than I do. So here's an example of crappy design. (And yes, we love our printer-maker clients and they are working on this. . . ). More examples to come, from other sorts of tech-tools.

Our Mulit-function printer (not the one pictured at right, which I borrowed from the Internet, but one rather like it), works quite well. Really well, in fact, and we use it plugged into our wireless router so all three of us can print with it, wire-free. But for scanning, you have to do some cable-rearranging.

You see, our printer is wrapped in a shiny black plastic case just like the one here. This means that icons or instructions embossed into it are rendered invisible to anyone over the age of 35. Which includes this writer and a lot of other humans who find office machine design thoughtless at best, or anyone with even the most minor visual impairment (which includes anyone peeking over to the dark, backside of a printer pushed against a wall, where it always lives: except in some Epson design center, perhaps—sorry printer-maker, its tough love).

To use the scanner, we have to unplug the USB cable from the router, and plugging in a USB cable attached to the nearby desktop computer, which has the scanning drivers loaded into PhotoShop. Sounds simple, right? Just a couple of steps. If only.

I count at least 25. Here’s the actual activity sequence.

1. Remove the existing cable that goes to the wireless modem. The cable promptly drops behind the file cabinet on which the printer rests, next to the wall (the printer sits on this low file cabinet). (Since it dropped, you can't tell the orientation of the business end of the USB cable).

2. Get on knees, grub around for the long end of the cable, pull it out of the crack between file cabinet and wall, and in the process, dislodge the cable from under the bit of wood flooring, the edge of which had covered the cable as it crossed a threshold.

3. Stick the cable back under the wood flooring so no one trips.

4. Get some scotch tape and tape the plug-in end of the USB cable to the file cabinet so it won’t fall down.

5. Find the desktop’s USB cable. That’s easy. Locate the plug-in end.

6. Try to reach behind the printer and plug in the chord.

7. Try again. The first orientation was wrong.

8. It is not going in. So, lean the printer over so you can try to see the USB plug in.

9. The business of leaning the computer over has unplugged the power chord. Power chord drops to the floor.

10. Get down on the floor again, pick up the power chord, and try to find a place to put it where you can reach it when you stand up again. This fails, as the chord is rather short and you don’t have a convenient outlet by this cabinet.

11. Get the scotch tape again. Tape the chord to the file cabinet.

12. Back to standing position (you’ve been on the floor twice now). Lean the printer over. You can’t see any indication on the black plastic to help you know how the cable is to be inserted. Its as little dark back there behind the printer, after all.

13. Move the papers off the top of the cabinet so you can turn the printer into the light, and

14. Move the desk light over closer to the printer. Get down on the floor again.

15. On your knees on the floor, with eye glasses off, a nearsighted person can make out the orientation of the plug-in.

16. Make a mental note of blood pressure, as you really wanted to scan a document for a client who you’ve told you would and could easily scan and send something promptly, and promptly was over with five minutes ago.

17. The phone rings. Compose yourself. Stand up again, dropping the chord behind the file cabinet one more time in the process.

18. Talk on the phone to another client (we are a micro-biz, so there is no one to else around today to answer the phone). Finish the call and hang up.

19. Back on your knees again to get the cable fished out, stay on your knees.

20. Insert the cable. Stand up.

21. Try to turn on the machine.

22. The machine won’t turn on because it is still unplugged.

23. Stifle the urge to throw the whole thing out the window and buy a manual typewriter and a stack of carbon paper with which to replace all your computers and printers.

24. Back on your knees to fish out the power cable which has fallen, again behind the cabinet (scotch tape wasn’t really designed to hold stuff like your power chord).

25. Plug in the printer and find your document and scan it at last.

Now, wasn't that a pain in the butt?