This app buys your feelings- to redesign the world.
You should know what design ethnography is. It’s rewriting the world.
But most people have never heard of it. Could an app change that?
When people ask me what I’m majoring in, and I say design ethnography, I get blank stares. So I just summarize what I’m interested in that week. I’ve said “usability”, “design strategy”, “organizational restructuring”, “qualitative research”, and my personal favorite “anthropology- but for businesses”.
But none of these fully explain what ethnography is. It’s the beating human heart of research and design. It’s a way to step outside your cultural conditioning and understand our true, hidden, complex needs. It’s what humans will have to rely on if we want a viable future.
Though ethnography promises lofty rewards, its application is far more practical. It involves going on-site (no focus groups required) then making human connections and finding surprising patterns. You have to rely on your own instincts, but you also have to second guess yourself endlessly. You’ll start to see issues that everyone recognizes but ignores. You might even find problems that nobody’s has ever noticed. You imagine a world where those problems are solved, which inevitably unearths a sea of new problems that you then have to confront. And confront you do, over and over, taking videos and pictures and field notes in every format imaginable, often with a squad of other highly trained researchers, until your (usually far too short) contract is almost over.
Then, you scramble to synthesize your findings. You end up with a handful of vital insights identifying the most important unmet needs of the people you researched. You make personas and customer journey maps and whatever else might get through to your employer.
If you stick around for the aftermath, new problems (you’ll call them opportunities) will continue to crop up as everyone works towards a solution. The process will be iterative. In this information economy, that’s important- without constant adaptation, any product/ service/ company can become outdated fast.
By obsessing over the shifting landscape of user needs, employee social structures, and product opportunities, ethnographers keep a company from veering dangerously off course.
If it’s so effective, why hasn’t it taken the world by storm?
Well, it kind of has. A pared down, pop culture version of design ethnography called “design thinking” has become popular in colleges, HR offices, and startups across the world. And many agencies and freelancers include ethnography as one of their specialties. Unfortunately, simply listing the word ethnography among other bullet points doesn’t mean someone truly understands anthropological research. To stay competitive, researchers like offering every service under the sun and letting clients pick and choose. And ethnography works best when undiluted; with quantitative analytics playing a supporting role, rather than the other way around.
There are several reasons why ethnography, and qualitative research in general, hasn’t taken over every part of every field- and become the ubiquitous social force that I believe it should be. For one, it isn’t as popular as quantitative analytics partially because of its limited reach. Ethnography has to be done on a small scale because it’s so labor intensive, and needs to be performed by talented professionals. This means it doesn’t get as much press as analytics. It also means it’s somewhat costly. Plus, it’s best as a continual process rather than an intensive study that researchers leave after a few weeks or months. Once a product or system stops getting iteratively redesigned, it’s more likely to stray down an unproductive path.
To make matters more complex, ethnography’s cost gives it a frivolous reputation. People mistakenly think it’s a technique reserved for only the biggest industries. Business owners with headquarters in smaller cities like Boise, Idaho (where I live) are often somewhat resistant to the hype around research. In their minds, even qualitative data is a distraction from traditional business wisdom (except the “20% of the time when they come up with something undeniably useful”, as one CEO told me). As for putting money into even “fluffier” types of research like design ethnography? No chance.
This mindset needs to change. Why?
Because our world is full of mindless, bad design. There’s no way we can confront the incredible number of design issues without taking a holistic, empathetic, human- centered approach to solving them. Ethnography is a secret darling of the user research world, but it needs to reach critical mass and go mainstream.
So what will it take to put ethnography in its rightful place- center stage?
One company- Spark Ideas, a consumer insights consultancy- is taking the first step towards scaling ethnographic research to a level where it can have unprecedented widespread impact. Currently, the company is small, and uses only word- of- mouth to advertise. But that doesn’t stop them from being the secret weapon in the pocket of some of the world’s biggest brands. In the last few years, they’ve quietly rolled out a paradigm shattering app called LookLook that brings ethnographic acuity to the scale of big data. The CEO calls it an anti-focus-group. Once participants are screened and accepted, they may be asked to give their gut response to a photo, film a shopping trip, or chat with a researcher about fashion. This elite group of research participants will, ideally, become mini- researchers themselves. Spark Ideas views this as more than just a way to just collect market research. Instead, they want to understand how to make participants’ lives better. By advocating participant needs to big companies, they can create lasting, meaningful, positive change.
Looking to the Future
This is a new technology, so it comes with a lot of unanswered questions. Each will need to be considered carefully.
The most pressing question for me: is this app as powerful as traditional ethnography? It’s certainly different. For one, traditional ethnography always takes place on-site. The natural environment is full of insights that can’t be found anywhere else. So if you’re researching yogurt, you hang out where it’s made, sold, and eaten. If you’re researching homelessness, you hang around the streets and shelters, but also where public policy is written. You have to learn to blend into any environment. Ethnographers are really good at noticing behaviors that people don’t notice in themselves. These are things people may never think to report themselves doing, even though they do it regularly.
Can LookLook get these deep insights as effectively through digital communication? Ideally, yes- as long as the participants are encouraged to enthusiastically embody their role as a researcher. They’ll have to be subtly trained to perform auto-ethnographies; to step outside their own perspective and view see their tacit behaviors more explicitly.
Shifting this responsibility to participants is actually not an unusual ethnographic practice. Great ethnographies are often supported by their most enthusiastic participants. And researchers will still have to put in the brunt of the work designing communication that elicits useful responses, in addition to identifying different user archetypes, behaviors, and patterns that may inform their research methods. LookLook will always need highly trained ethnographers behind the scenes. This, along with the two-way realtime communication element, puts a distinct limitation on the app’s scalability.
Staying small is ok- for now.
Spark’s size keeps it focused and agile. But imagine for a moment if LookLook was used as widely as Facebook. It would create a brand new, qualitative segment of big data. Unlike Facebook (and practically every other app), LookLook empowers people to take control of the data they choose to, or not to, share. It’s not hard to imagine it gaining in popularity; after all, the app is gamified, social, and emotionally rewarding. It could fit perfectly into the rising “gig economy” trend. And most of all, it would fill a desperate need for an empathetic and human counterpoint to the cold, unfeeling field of analytics.
Of course, if this app is to ever bring ethnography to the masses, it needs to undergo a massive structural change. I don’t think that will happen for a while. It may not even happen with Spark. But Spark is currently looking to expand its participant pool, which may require a proportional increase in highly trained research staff. The change may very well be on its way.
So what would that structural change look like?
One option is to train the most promising participants to take on increasing amounts of research responsibility. This would require training them in ethnographic methods, circumventing traditional education channels. It would fit in with the 21st century’s growing cultural shift towards experiential learning. It would also utilize a proven tendency for people to adopt responsibility within digital forums.
LookLook as Radical Transparency
Brand social media accounts, ads, and PR campaigns seem desperate, messy, and disrespectful. The networks that companies usually use to communicate with the public are outdated. Maybe it’s time to replace them. Spark could design permanent, LookLook-esque, two-way communication systems between customers, employees, and brands.
Why is this necessary? Because, to jaded millennials and Gen Z kids, big companies are laughably and horrifyingly out-of-touch. Despite pouring billions into research, brands seem unable to understand real people. Current channels seem ingenuine. Brand loyalty is rapidly going extinct- unless a brand has meme-like status (think of Gucci or Supreme) it stains peoples’ carefully curated lifestyles. Everyone knows it’s near impossible to force a meme into existence, but corporations are still trying to make it happen on a grand scale. They need to loosen their hold on their pre-internet understanding of trends.
It’s time for a new paradigm entirely. The only way brands can create loyalty is by crafting a genuine, transparent ethical case for themselves. Perhaps they could empower their audience to make that case on their behalf. By inviting consumers into a space where they’re treated like individuals, brands would be finally seen as transparent, making a difference, caring, trying. In the process, they will step out of damage control mode, and get more insight on the deep needs of their customers. The same relations makeover could be done internally to reduce turnover and other costly problems.
There are other important questions about LookLook’s future, too. Could the app ever transition to primarily addressing social issues rather than corporate ones? How would this be funded? Will the app branch out into systems and organizational design, or stick to researching product and brand identity? And could it work with smaller companies?
In the end, we’re lucky to be in a place where we can ask these questions. For the first time in history, we have the tools to design our world around human needs. Someday soon, if we’re lucky, we can stop shaping human needs around a poorly designed world.
