Team-Based Ethnography

An Integrated User-Centered Approach for Project Teams

Project success depends on the fit of a product or service with user goals and needs. Project manageability depends on a solid shared foundation for swift and effective decision-making. The Team-Based Ethnography offers a methodology to achieve both.

The Team-Based Ethnography enables project teams to get to know users and to design for their needs. It lets teams adjust basic project management processes instead of adding new activities onto the existing workload. The approach focuses on

• sharing and leveraging existing knowledge about users and their context
• integrating a user-centered perspective into the design and development process
• containing the project schedule and budget

How it Works

The Mural is the driver of the Team-Based Ethnography. The basic framework is created in the Team Meeting, which also serves to decide on roles and contributions and track open questions. From that point on, the team elaborates, adds to, corrects, and interprets the Mural in regular team meetings, making results continually available as a basis for design and testing. Interfacility meets with the team for occasional debriefs over the course of the project to review new findings and plan appropriate testing. The engagement concludes with an evaluation.

Deliverables

The central deliverable coming out of the Team-Based Ethnography is a manageable research-based, user-centered design and development process. The process revolves around "The Mural"--an ethnographic framework built collaboratively and annotated throughout the project. It includes demographics, personas, scenarios, a feature meter, and an annotated workflow. Check out the Team-Based Ethnography brochure for more info about the Mural.

The project concludes with an evaluation following launch. A single evaluation session results in an evaluation report that reviews lessons learned and helps solidify the user-centered design perspective in the team.

Accelerating Projects

The Team-Based Ethnography tends to accelerate projects since it helps clarify requirements and provides a basis for quick but reliable decision-making whenever questions arise during the implementation phase. Additional time is gained when the optional components-the initial user assessment and the collaborative design session-are combined with the basic process.

Optional User Assessment (performed by Interfacility) -- Consists of user interviews, participant observation, ride-alongs, and other ethnographic techniques to gain quick insight into user context and preferences. Although length depends on the nature of the targeted user base, a typical user assessment for an internal application development project will take one to two weeks.

Optional Collaborative Design Session (led by Interfacility) -- Includes all team members who contribute to and influence the design of the site or application. The design session focuses on translating knowledge about users into specific design requirements; generating design ideas; and developing an evaluation procedure for those ideas.

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