Response to User Research
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Design Ethnography
Ethnography is the study of humans in their culture, but what exactly is design ethnography? It is taking the current culture and bridging the priorities and expectations with your design process. The author of Just Enough Research suggests taking ideas from our physical environment, creating a mental model, or researching habits and relationships. You can not just imply how an audience would react to your design, to have empathy you have to go out into the field and get your knees deep in the culture!
Design ethnography is similar to having empathy for your audience (Hall, 2013). To practice it, you have to gather an audience that is credible and willing to give you a deeper understanding and the current problems they have with a product. Observe in environments where you are able to personally experience the same obstacles, and then with all this data you can go back and break down the statistics to analyze what works and what does not.
User Persona
A user persona is a representation of your audience and their priorities that is created after going out and conversing with your research audience (Hall, 2013). Why might we create such models, you ask? They’re helpful for projecting the obstacles a design team might need to overcome in their designs, and presenting the current situation to marketers. Personas can pose their own threats in user research as well, they can be too vague and do not capture enough of the sampling frame. To mitigate around such dangers, designers have to capture as much representation into their personas. Hall suggests stating a name, goals, quotes, and behaviors that would fit your personas to target as closely to how an actual audience member might react to a design product.