How To Build A Better Product—Study People
How To Build A Better Product—Study People - Yahoo! News
Bary Alyssa Johnson - PC Magazine Tue May 9, 9:25 AM ET
Did you ever imagine the world's largest chipmaker may ride the train into work with you to find out how mobility could be improved?
Product development has historically been predicated on a "build it and they will come" basis. But times are changing, consumer choice is increasing and the game plan has evolved.
Ethnography, a branch of anthropology, uses a variety of research methods to study people in a bid to understand human culture. Since top companies across several industries are treating ethnography as a means of designing for and connecting with potential customers, technology companies have recently begun investing significantly more research time and money into the field. At chip giant Intel, for example, the company spent approximately $5 billion on ethnographic research and development during 2004.
As the respective leaders in the hardware and operating systems markets, both Intel and fellow tech giant Microsoft have begun using teams of researchers to identify new market opportunities and improve existing products.
"As the global market becomes more competitive in technology it's not enough just to say that you have the coolest new product," said Tracey Lovejoy, who works as an anthropologist at Microsoft. "Consumers have so many choices today, so you have to work hard to understand what people want and need."
At Intel, for example, the company's anthropologists have been focusing their efforts on user-centered innovation over the past two decades. Intel has also begun a wide range of pilot programs in place to meet the needs of potential consumers in remote areas. For example, the company is looking at making e-banking and e-government applications available through a community PC platform in Mexico. Intel also has unveiled community-based PC platforms in rural India and Mexico, a direct result of its ethnographic research.
"There are billions of people around the world with little or no access to the Internet," said Kevin Teixeira, a spokesman for Intel. "Our ethnographers meet with these people, live in their towns and get to appreciate their socioeconomic conditions."
Intel executives recently announced plans to spend $1 billion on bringing Internet access to emerging nations.
"Intel has sociologists, anthropologists, psychologists and ethnographers on-staff…learning how people want to use technology, then going back to the engineers with that information, who use it to figure out how to sell more chips for Intel," said Gerry Kaufhold, an analyst with In-Stat.
Microsoft, meanwhile, is using "personas" to identify the archetypical consumers that will be using its products, including its new Vista platform. The company's researchers put together detailed profiles to help identify the different features each category of customer would need.
"Anthropology and ethnography help you understand the people," Kaufhold said. "The great thing about people is that they don't move nearly as quickly as technology does, so you can do a fifty-year plan on the evolution of consumers, which would probably be more accurate than a fifty-year plan on the evolution of technology."
Intel's process
Intel Labs employs a number of ethnographers that work within its business divisions. Included on the roster of social science-based research teams are Intel's Digital Home Group, Digital Health Group and Emerging Markets division of its Channel Platforms Group.
Intel's anthropological researchers immerse themselves in the "natural environments of real people" – including hospitals, elder hostels, schools for hearing impaired children, remote villages in emerging nations, and more – and utilize different tools and techniques to collect data which, in turn, is used to help make future business decisions.
To create these user-centered technologies, Intel uses methods like videotaping and interviewing potential consumers, shadowing people during their daily activities (what the company calls "deep hanging out") as well as "focus troupes," which help to demonstrate the technology.
"Actors are hired to act out scenarios of hypothetical concepts to help people grasp ideas they've never experienced before," said Christine Riley, manager of Intel's People and Practices Research Group, in a statement."Theater works really well to get people to suspend belief, and you need very few props to excite imagination. The whole idea is to be very open-ended and to get new ideas." Continued...
Technology as culture
Intel researchers studied the aging process in different cultures for several years and came up with several technologies that allow caregivers to keep a remote eye on their loved ones by tracking their daily activity from afar.
In the U.S., much of the elderly population appreciates the ability to maintain their independence by living in their own homes, rather than taking to the institutional lifestyle, Intel researchers said. At the same time, these older individuals are concerned about "burdening" their loved ones, who take on the unofficial role of caregiver. This is largely an American phenomenon; in Japan, families are much more willing to care for their elderly relatives.
"We don't want [the elderly] to feel like they're under surveillance so we try and stay away from cameras and work more with sensors," said John Sherry, an Intel ethnographer who works in its Digital Health organization. "By putting simple sensors in doors, chairs and under mattresses you can get a sense of how much a person moves around the house and you can track their activities."
"We're also doing a pilot project in India where eye doctors can perform eye exams using a digital camera connected to a PC," Teixeira said. "That could bring a lot more medical access to all parts of the world."
As part of its research on globalization and technology, Intel studied "trans-nationals," people who are not born in a place, but live there. In London and India, for example, up to 30 percent of the population may have moved from another country. In such a case, money, technology, and culture flow back and forth as the transnational populations keep contact with family and friends back home.
"Besides the sheer value of money we're also interested in the understanding of technology," said Ken Anderson, an anthropologist for Intel's People and Practices Research Group. "For example, a man from Ghana who was living in London went back to Ghana with his iPod and transferred music onto his cousin's hard disk. His cousin didn't have an iPod so he ended up cracking the hard disk out of his machine and taking it to parties."
In other international research, the company has been testing a "China Home Learning PC," which is geared toward educational use and is being branded, produced and marketed by Shanghai-based PC marker Founder.
Intel called in its ethnographers to help create the product, which would have to address a number of issues.
"The standard PC isn't quite a fit for families in China because one of the hardest things in Chinese education is learning how to write," Teixeira said. "That information was brought back, mentally digested and a prototype was developed. One element was to design a computer with a touch screen and stylus so students could practice Chinese characters."
The company didn't participate in any actual field work while researching for the learning PC, due to "logistical constraints," so the ethnographers created a so-called "China Room" as a substitute.
The "China Room" work space was designed to incorporate photographs and other relevant artifacts to "allow for some level of immersion by the US-based product definition team." It may not have worked; some researchers from Intel who recently visited China said that the Learning PC is not doing as well as expected in the target market.
"Intel is a leader [in this area], no question," Intel's Sherry said. "Microsoft [also] has some capabilities that are differently and maybe more appropriately structured for their own corporation, but we have some collaboration going on cross-organization as well."
"Since Xerox PARC [Palo Alto Research Center] started hiring anthropologists in the 1970s, it has become a pretty standard practice," Lovejoy said. "In terms of companies using anthropologists today, HP has a pretty long history – also IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Motorola,
Nokia, Yahoo, Adobe…and outside of the tech realm there's Wal-Mart, Washington Mutual, Wells Fargo, GM, JC Penney..." Continued...
Applying anthropology to Vista
Microsoft is relatively new to corporate anthropology; the company hired its first full-time anthropologist in 2000. Since then, it has carried out extensive research on consumers and culture across the globe and in the U.S.
"We started developing Vista five years ago," Lovejoy said. "I did a lot of work looking at how people work with files. Vista has an entirely new storage model that helps people conceptualize file structure."
In developing Vista, Microsoft researchers learned that people often forget file names. They discovered that there are clear ways people associate their files, such as by topic or date, and realized that the company hadn't traditionally leveraged such information.
"Microsoft for a long time put technology at the center of development," Lovejoy said. "My job is to put people at the center of everything we do in terms of development."
Early on in its Vista research, Microsoft defined three key demographics that the new operating system would target: enterprise, small business and consumer. During product development, the company's anthropologists ran several in-depth studies to examine potential customers.
"I did a lot of research looking at storage models, communication and mobility," Lovejoy said. "I did a two-year study with enterprise workers and followed them everywhere they went…thinking about the role of OS in communication and how mobility affects work."
Aside from shadowing future Vista users, Microsoft researchers also compiled statistical and field data to create a set of "personas" for the new operating system, representing the ideal customer for a particular product.
"Personas are fake people based on real data that are used as a tool to help the product development team focus their vision," Lovejoy said. "For Vista there were seven personas to spread across small business, enterprise and consumer."
One of Vista's consumer personas was a woman named Abby, who the researchers envisioned was mother to a teenage son. Abby became an intrinsic part of Microsoft's research process, Lovejoy said. Each time the team convened to discuss potential Vista features, they would relate their ideas to each persona to examine relevance and usefulness, among other things.
Vista researchers were given documented profiles on each persona. Microsoft officials also displayed detailed posters about each profile in the workplace and project managers were encouraged to think about Abby and the others when writing up specification sheets about products.
"So if you're building a media player, you know that your key personas are Abby and her son," Lovejoy said. "You're not looking to build a good player for someone in the enterprise because they don't use a lot of media in the workplace."
While carrying out ethnographic research, Microsoft began examining cultural issues in other countries around the world. Microsoft established a research center in India that was designed for studying changes in the country's middle-class social patterns, along with associated technology intersections as they relate to income level. The center was important for determining the needs of the developing markets.
"India, Brazil, Russia and China are our biggest new markets outside of the United States," Lovejoy said. "There are [already] products existing for those countries right now."
Microsoft
Windows XP Starter Edition, an inexpensive version of the Windows OS, was one of those products. The low-cost alternative was designed to simplify the user experience for first-time PC users by including additional components for help, among other features.
"Vista won't have a Starter Edition skew because it's high-end," Lovejoy said. "But around the same time that Vista is released, we'll also have a new version of Starter Edition."
Microsoft's online unit, MSN, has also been working with online content as it relates to cultural scenarios in different countries. One of the topics that MSN addressed in its research was the fact that its Messenger product has not been widely adopted in Japan, as opposed to in the U.S. where instant messaging has become something of a pop-culture phenomenon.
MSN researchers reasoned that issues often crop up when it comes to the way people approach each other in terms of communication. In Japan it's considered rude to interrupt somebody, so instant messaging is seen as the ultimate interruption. It's different in American culture because instant messaging is not considered disruptive or rude, as the user has a choice in whether or not to respond, according to Lovejoy.
"In Japan there are unequal power dynamics, which makes some forms of communication inappropriate," Lovejoy said. "For example in the work place in Japan I would never use IM to connect to my boss." Continued...
Demand for researchers growing
Having proven the value of ethnography in their own research departments, Intel, Microsoft and other employers are now struggling to attract new talent.
Top researchers at Intel and Microsoft created EPIC (the Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference), an annual joint venture hosted by Intel and Microsoft. The conference was created to enable ethnographic collaboration opportunities across all industries as well as an opportunity to network.
The 2006 EPIC conference is slated to be held September 24-26 at Intel's conference center in Portland, Ore. The brains behind the EPIC conference are Intel's Ken Anderson and Microsoft's Tracey Lovejoy, both ethnographers for their respective companies.
"The audiences for traditional Intel conferences have always been 'us' – Intel trying to teach Intel," Anderson said. "The EPIC Conference is different in that it's open to anybody. It's designed for people outside of technology."
Once a purely academic discipline, ethnography is moving out of the classroom and into corporate laboratories – and not just within IT firms. The field is touching almost every industry including finance, advertising, banking, marketing, food manufacturing and more. Representative companies at EPIC include Instrata, Pitney-Bowes, Yahoo Europe, Veri-Phi Consulting, PARC USA and Red Associates Denmark, all of whom serve on various organizational committees.
"Ten out of Microsoft's seventy thousand employees are people who practice anthropology," Lovejoy said. "The situation is similar in other companies as well, so…that means there aren't a lot of people with similar jobs to network with. We created EPIC as a networking opportunity."
According to Anderson, when he graduated from college the emphasis was on getting a job within the academic sector because such a position would allow for teaching, researching and creating new content in the ever-expanding field of anthropology.
"When I was in school, corporate anthropology was a very dirty word in a 'sell-out' way, as if it wasn't 'real' anthropology," Lovejoy noted. "There's since been a massive disconnect because most new jobs today are available in the corporate sector and students are having trouble getting jobs in academic placement."
Although this trend is still mid-transition, signs point toward increased ethnographic employment outside of the scholastic realm. Anderson says he has spoken with the American Anthropological Association (AAA), which says a high-priority issue is employing more people outside of academia. The AAA is beginning to encourage professors to encourage their students to pursue corporate-type careers, according to Anderson.
"But they haven't fully thought through the ramifications for that yet," Anderson noted.
The AAA was founded in 1902 as the world's largest organization of individuals interested in anthropology, according to its Web site.
"Now we're not only ethnographers, we're becoming theoreticians and we'll end up changing the discipline, I think," Anderson said. "In two years we'll have the brightest students [working with us] rather than keeping them in academia."
May 14, 2006 at 09:57 AM in Consumer trends | Permalink
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