I’ve gushed before over Just Enough Research before, Erika Hall’s outstanding primer on UX research and thinking about research in a broader commercial sense, but this morning I came across a hidden gem.
In re-reading Chapter 5, I came across a link that I had missed before, to the Helsinki Design Lab – specifically their Ethnographic Fieldguide, a concise, delightfully Finnish document that outlines a manner of thinking and approaching research from an ethnographic perspective. What does that mean?
Ethnography aims to get under the skin of human behavior, to better understand the world and the specifics of the cultures we live in. The focus of the research can be anything from current cultural tendencies, to changing values, attitudes and norms, or concrete human behavior and its motivations within different situations and contexts.
You can find the Ethnographic Fieldguide, and learn more about the HDL, here.
Simon Ouderkirk 