The power of ethnographic research

Don’t ever underestimate being where your users are.

Ethnography, for those who don’t know, is the art and science of people-watching (or more technically correct, observing).

Apart from my full time job as a UXer, I am also a part time photographer, not doing it for the money though, it’s a passionate hobby of mine.

And this hobby led me to get really good at this very unique part of my UX job, people watching.

See, the one part of photography that I love the most is Street and Documentary Photography. The street photography part specifically is the one that requires you to observe people from the side, be somewhat invisible and constantly be on the look out for something interesting that a person would do, might do or about to do. And in order to produce an interesting photograph, a shot that tells a story in one single static image, you must be as close as possible to the action/person/group of people.

As some of the great masters of the craft used to say “if your photo is not good enough, that means you’re not close enough” — Robert Capa and as I like to say “you gotta be in their face without them knowing you’re there”.

Ethnographic research is kind of like street photography: you are there to observe and try to pick up on what people do, how they do it, why they do it and where do they stumble, etc. and in the process, you might discover something you were not looking for but turned out to be of great value… and thats exactly what happened to me in this story.

A few years back, we were working on a project with one of the largest US banks to provide an increased security solutions for a very specific need for their branches across the nation.

During the process of learning more about the specific needs of the bank and branch employees, alongside our sales leader I went to visit one of the branches in New York.

The visit had very specific agenda and plan of what we need to learn in order to better understand the pain points of the branch employees and have a better idea on how we can solve their problems.

The plan was simple:

• Observe what different level employees do and how