Lifting the lid on ethnographic research

Hear from speakers share their experiences observing target users in their natural, real-world setting.

Topics include:

• No Place like Home: Building Happiness into Dementia Care, Jenny Holland

This presentation will describe a project with the objective of supporting our client's determination to deliver more specialised care for individuals living with dementia. Talking through some of the harder and more comedic moments of fieldwork, this presentation explores the lives, experiences and desires of people living in dementia care homes. This project won the Virginia Valentine Award for Cultural Insight at the 2012 MRS Awards.

• Research with families in crisis, Jake Garber

In Buckinghamshire, a large partnership of state and voluntary agencies formed to find a new way of working together around families in crisis. They knew that despite a common mission to support vulnerable families, diverse agency priorities across the group had led to siloed working and fractured support.

We spent extended time with ten families to see the world from their perspective. To deepen our understanding, we used visual tools to map local areas, social relationships, timelines and moments of crisis.We discovered families held in stasis by services, rather than finding stability they could build on. As a result services were struggling to support families develop their own positive responses to crisis.

Presenting rich pictures of real families sparked different kinds of conversation and actions across the partnership. Co-designed solutions based on this research are currently being tested and implemented.

• Ethnography for eCommerce, Annette Priest

What’s it like to conduct ethnography for an e-commerce website? Among practical tips and tricks for conducting your ethnography project, this presentation will answer questions such as:

• What can an organisation gain from ethnography?

• How does ethnography fit into a holistic UX research approach?

• How can we get execs to say “Yes” to ethnography (and fund it!)

• How do I avoid common pitfalls?

See speaker bios (https://www.meetup.com/researchthing/pages/Speakers/)