The new digital ethnographer’s toolkit:
Capturing a participant’s lifestream
Dr Christopher Khalil
Senior Experience Architect
9/4/2009 News Digital Media 1

The talk will explain what the
'new ethnographer's toolkit'
is, and how it can be used to
reconstruct user behaviour and
thus enable better informed design
decisions.

WARNING / RELIEF:
No theory will follow
We’re talking about the toolkit
remember
So, we’ll look at a
Case Study & Try out the Tools

Lifestream
Digital fingerprints
• Twitter
• Facebook
• Email
• IM
• Blog posts
• RSS feeds
• Mobile:
– SMS/iPhone/Voice

Cultural Probes
• A great user experience is gained from understanding a
user’s
– Needs
– Behaviours
– Motivations
• Ethnographic research gives insight based on
observing users, often, over a long period of time
• Isn’t always possible due to lack of time or resource
• Good alternative is to use a Cultural Probe.
• Cultural Probes can sometimes take the form of paper
diaries

Some issues with conventional
probes
• Asynchronous (you do it once a day)
• Minutiae and richness of the everyday is
often lost in the edited and processed
view the participant takes in their diary
entry.
• Self-referential (talk about my day
through a frame I think is important)

Digital Probes
• Synchronous: Capture lifestream
automatically
– i.e. twitter, delicious, facebook, blog, rss
• Less self-referential: ‘Real time’ capture
ensures a more realistic, natural record of the
participant’s life than asking them to fill out a
diary entry alone
• Natural: Recording mechanism is in the same
medium & context the researcher is trying to find
out more about (i.e. web)

Other advantages
• Closely connect the researcher to the
participant
• Facilitates easier analysis, versioning and
distribution
• Still allows conventional diary entry (i.e.
capture offline events & reflection)

Using Tumblr as Probe Platform
Integrates several technologies into one lifestream
• Twitter
• Email
• iPhone
• Voice
• Images
• Videos
• Bookmarks
• Flickr
• RSS
EXCEPT: Facebook (to come)
We setup a FB account participants ‘friended’ us
for a week

Case Study

Moshtix
• Moshtix is one of Australia's largest ticketing sites
• WHY: Deeper understanding of audience
– Personas
• WHY: Broader view of user behaviours, activities,
philosophies in a specific mental space (music, events)
– Mental Model
– Common Scenarios
• WHY: Identify new opportunities
– Mental Model
– GAP analysis
• WHY: Base the product strategy on real,
observed user needs and activities

Process
• Recruit users
• Pre-Probe Interview (30 mins)
• Run the Probe (1 week)
• Post-Probe Interview (1.5 hours)
– This is the key stage

Recruiting

Recruit Users
ETHNIO
• Recruit real users from your site
• Relatively inexpensive
• Easy to use and setup
• Screen based on existing models or business
targets (e.g. Roy Morgan, Prior Research)
• Does take time to recruit users, but good results
• Let’s have a look

Ethnio Demo

A few Ethnio tips
Screener:
• Keeper as short as possible, use follow up email to
focus in
• Speak audiences language
• Be very clear on incentive, location
• Don’t offer users options
Frequency:
• Adjust the frequency as required depending on
– Number of participants
– Time to research
– Page traffic
– Business needs
• Generally better to start high then turn down
Organisation
• Factor in a good amount of time to organise
• Create 2nd tier list and backups

So, you have some recruits now
what?
1. Pick the ones who most closely match your
criteria
2. Let others know you’ll use them down the line
(focus groups and further research)
3. Ring users
1. much faster and reliable than email
2. ensure they have enough time to participate
4. Send privacy agreements for review
5. Follow up call to quickly explain process
6. You’re good to go…

The Probe

Pre-Probe Interview
Objective: Encourage participation by making probe as
easy as possible
1. Need access to their machine or demo on your
machine
2. Get everything setup for them
– Login all setup
– Take them through what they need and why.
– Set the expectation that we really need their help, incentive
isn’t enough
• Explain what you want from them
– Anything relating to music, events or just general interest
• Let’s have a look & create our own probe

Tumblr Demo

Join in the UXA Tumblr
URL: www.tumblr.com |
uxa2009.tumblr.com
Login:
uxa2009@yahoo.com.au
Password: uxa2009

Lets have a look
& see what we’ve got
(has the voice been
added)

During Probe Period
• Monitor probes and contributions
• Try to interfere as little as possible
• Be encouraging
• Direct them in how you’d like them to use
the probe (i.e. more commentary)
• If it looks like they are not contributing,
gently remind them of probe timescales

Post Probe Interview
• Ask users to take you on their journey
• Reflection rather than conjecture
• Open questions, get at the why
• Expound on context
• Get them to ‘show and tell’ on activities

In Practice
• Record screen if possible
• Transcribe
– Pay professional service
– Playback audio/video
– Have 2 people, one to take notes

What’s next

Analysis
• No way around it, this is hard work
• Probes generate a tonne of data
• Need to live with data for a while
• Use a methodology such as Grounded
Theory
– Codify, Cluster, Categories
– Generate model
– Generate personas
– Some tools: MaxQDA, Excel

Probe
Mental Model
Examples Persona

Conclusion
• Effective qualitative research can be carried out using
digital cultural probes
• Wide variety of technologies enable us to capture
user’s activities
• Probe can be used to create a mental model based
on authentic:
– goals
– behaviours
– motivations.
• Probe can be used to create personas using
authentic:
– behavioural dimensions
– examples i.e. sites visited (bookmarked in probe)
• VERY useful for finding things that might be out of
scope: gap analysis
• Probes are also good for organisational buy-in

Questions ?
Dr Christopher Khalil
Senior Experience Architect
News Digital Media
christopherkhalil@yahoo.co.uk
www.chriskhalil.com