paper: rapid ethnography

Rapid Ethnography: Time-Deepening Strategies for HCI Field Research
David R. Millen
Proceedings of DIS'00

HCI has come to highly regard ethnographic research as a useful and powerful methodology for understanding the needs and work practices of a user population. However, full ethnographies are also notoriously time and resource heavy, making it hard to fit into a deadline-driven development cycle. This paper presents techniques for rapid, targeted ethnographic work, in the hopes of accruing much of the benefit of field work while still fitting within acceptable time bounds.

The paper organizes its suggestions around three core themes:

• Narrow the field of focus before entering the field
• GOAL: Zoom in on important activities
• Move from 'wide-angle lens' metaphor to 'telephoto lens'
• Identify an informant to use as a field guide
• People with broad access
• Can discuss interesting behaviors and social tensions up front
• Find liminal informants
• Fringe members of groups
• Usually have free movement about group
• Not so engrained that work patterns and relationships have become taken for granted
• Find corporate informants
• Employees of the organization in question
• Colleagues, field staff such as service reps
• Use fringe sampling methods to identify potential informants of interest
• Plan at onset to develop long-term informant relationships
• Use multiple interactive observation techniques
• GOAL: Increase likelihood of exceptional and useful behavior
• More than one observer onsite.
• Parallelize observations
• Get multiple perspectives
• Careful to avoid changing work environment by additional presence
• Identify opportunistic times of observation
• Maximize learning rate
• E.g. look at electronic logs to determine times of peak activity
• More interactive approaches
• Interactive feature conceptualization
• Group Elicitation Method
• Observer-participation
• Understanding through personal experience
• Understand affective issues around field activities
• Use collaborative and computerized iterative data analysis methods
• GOAL: More efficiently analyze collected data
• Use computer assisted analysis tools
• Text (FolioViews, AskSAM)
• Video, Audio coding and playback software
• Collaborative analysis techniques
• Cognitive (concept) mapping
• Pictorial storytelling
• Scenario analysis