I submitted a proposal today to SXSW 2011 to present the topic: “Digital Ethnography for Design Innovation.” Please vote for my panel at the URL: http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/ideas/view/8232
If my panel is selected, I will present methods Usography has developed over the past couple of years for structured analysis of social media using principles from ethnography as a theoretical foundation.
The presentation will focus on identifying needs, gaps and opportunities through virtual participant observation, discourse analysis, identification and operationalization of key dimensions, audience segmentation, formulation of design concepts, and reporting results. There is a significant time element to overlay on the process, because one major benefit of social media as a data collection method is that it is real time. Emerging trends appear in social contexts long before they are surfaced to broader attention through traditional media. This has implications for designers, because there is a latent period between idea and realization, so understanding the trends in a particular product domain is an important aspect of successful innovation (unless you are designing in a market-agnostic vacuum – possible, but not widespread).
My experience with this topic stems from structured review of social media on e-commerce sites. Customers’ passion really strikes you as they express their pain and frustration to peers. But just reading through a mountain of remarks, with no benchmark as to honesty or authenticity or relevance, is not necessarily going to be a fruitful exercise. This is where ethnographic methods come in. They are especially suited to extracting key dimensions from massive amounts of discourse, leading to a deep understanding of the underlying scaffolding that drives behavior.
The trick will be finding a happy medium between tediously theoretical and plebeian pap.
Please go over and vote a thumbs up at: http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/ideas/view/8232
Copyright 2010, Paul Bryan, Usography Corporation (http://www.usography.com)
Linked In: http://www.linkedin.com/in/uxexperts
