I recently attended a talk by Elizabeth Churchill, Principle Research Scientist at Yahoo Inc, California. She was presenting her ideas from a HCI perspective and as a part of the Big Thinkers Series, organized by Yahoo Research and Development, Bangalore.
The talk focused around the idea of SocioTechnical Design and Engineering. The context was primarily in understandings for the Internet Experience Domain. It was a great talk! I enjoyed every moment of it. It is especially important in the context in which we have opened up Deskala. At Deskala, we are exploring the reach of technology in emerging markets and coming up with design solutions, services and innovations.
With the context of communities changing everyday (Sherry Turkle et al. ), the way we conduct research on users is also changing. What was the notion of a community a few years ago is not the same today. Cyber-ethnography has become the most appropriate tool in reaching a definition of the virtual community.
In the context of an emerging market like India, the need for defining newer methods of user research is important. The penetration of technology is limited to the mobile experiences amongst the emerging markets population. But with the ever changing technological scenario, the technological intervention will expand to other forms of technology.
One of the key propositions going on in the design research field is to bridge the gap between the offline and the online. In India at-least, inspite of having a good reach of technology, there are only 32.1% of the population who are online and are accessing internet from devices.
The notion of cyber space, is therefore not limited only to the online world. One has to expand the understanding of the cyber space. So in the ideal case of cyber-ethnography, one would spend hours in this cyber space, enacting roles, understanding virtual and real space, defining and redefining social interactions etc. This could go on for hours.
As Interaction Designers who have worked for clients who are mostly located in the West, we all have done cyber-ethnography at some point of time. This is a result of the inability of the designer to interact face to face with the likely users. So cyber-ethnography comes into the picture here.
In a question in the conference I had asked that what are the challenges that we face in India (and other emerging markets) when we are looking at doing cyber-ethnography for the users in areas that do not have so much of an online presence, but are still getting their dose of Technology. Elizabeth, mentioned these below set of challenges and I think the points were very valid.
To start with, perhaps the most important is to understand the mutual benefits that one is looking at when doing cyber-ethnography. What are the benefits that the designers and the communities on whom the research is being done upon have? Secondly there is always a challenge with the time frames. Due to the infrastructure capability of the emerging markets in context of the internet reach and broadband connectivity, getting the right research done in the right span of time will always be a challenge.
Thirdly, defining the Business Values that the cyber-ethnography could bring along in-order to finding design ideas and solutions is a challenge.
One always has to question the usage patterns and the likely usage scenarios amongst the users. This comes with its own set of challenges as everyday the scenario changes with more and more people in the emerging markets getting onto the Internet. This usage patterns are time bound, sociological bound and also always debating the role of the community.
