PARC Approach & Experience
Using ethnography to glean actionable insights has become common practice for many companies (see for example "The Science of Desire", Business Week). However, since "corporate ethnography" has become a catchall category for a range of customer-insight approaches, it's often difficult to distinguish among available providers – particularly since ethnographers come from a variety of disciplines (anthropology, sociology, psychology, etc.).
Choosing skilled ethnographers is essential to help companies maximize their ethnographic investment. Since pioneering corporate ethnography and conducting studies in various settings, PARC ethnographers are particularly adept at focusing the scope of the ethnographic study and gleaning actionable insights for our clients. Some general ways clients can benefit from our approach are described below, though specific benefits are usually tailored to client needs.
Benefits
- Gain a more complete and nuanced picture of target customers, markets, or processes of interest. Drawing on diverse observational and analytical approaches, PARC ethnographers combine methods in unique ways to maximize insights from the ethnographic study (as opposed to relying on standard market research approaches that yield limited slices of the picture). Our diverse method repertoire enables us to tailor studies to match the company's goals and target markets of interest, as well as develop custom tools (e.g., handheld-data collection logs) to simplify the study and reduce the burden on participants.
- Customize or tailor engagements to specific needs. PARC ethnographers have led a broad range of efforts – from rapid, targeted inquiries (few days) to large-scale research programs (few years) – in a variety of settings such as international corporations, urban streets, retail storefronts, call centers, software development laboratories, and virtual worlds. This flexibility allows us to customize engagements to meet our clients' expected time/ resource investment.
- Access leading-edge technology insights throughout the engagement. Unlike typical market-researchers or other ethnographers, PARC ethnographers are immersed in one of the world's most prolific and wide-ranging cultures of technology innovation – where they fully participate in all research on technologies that impact people in any way. They therefore have the rare ability to understand future technology capabilities and identify new applications, services, markets, or organizational processes that align with clients' existing intellectual assets/ practices or address their problems. Furthermore, PARC ethnographers work closely with clients' R&D organizations (and PARC scientists) to develop the strategically targeted concepts and the technology components or infrastructures necessary to bring them to life.
- Greater end-user success Since PARC ethnographers focus on grounding assumptions in reality, we help our clients avoid costly design mistakes or other misdirected investments (such as developing employee programs that won't be adopted or investing in a new product that could be blindsided by an emerging technology trend). For companies interested in technology innovation, PARC ethnographers are adept at co-developing prototypes and testing them with actual end-users in relevant settings. For companies interested in process innovation, PARC ethnographers have a wealth of experience in studying the "customer front" – the in-person, over-the-phone, or online junctures where a company interacts with its customers or core employees – which is often where many company practices frequently break down. These experiences ensure greater success from the ethnographic study.
Experience
Domains and Platforms:
- Collaborative Design
- Collaborative Learning
- Computer-mediated Communication
- Gaming and Entertainment
- Healthcare
- Information Technology
- Knowledge-sharing Practices
- Media and Publishing
- Mobile, Ubiquitous, and Context-aware Computing
- PIM & Task Management
- Process Control
- Project Management
- Security & Privacy
- Software Development
- Sustainability and CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility)
- Transportation
- User-centered Design
- Virtual Worlds
- Workspace Collaboration
|
|
Settings:
- Call & Customer Centers
- Classrooms
- Communication Centers (e.g., 9-1-1)
- Customer/Client Interfaces & Customer Service Departments
- Document Production Centers
- Engineering/ System Engineering Departments
- Factories
- Fortune 500 Companies
- Global Insurance & Finance Firms
- Homes
- Laboratories
- Mission Control Rooms (e.g., NASA)
- Multinational Corporatons
- Retail Storefronts
- Online/ MMORPGs
- Software Development Laboratories
- Survey Research Centers
- Urban Streets
- Workplaces
|
Sample Data Collection Methods & Analyses:
- Brainstorming – collaborative, strategic
- Co-design and Participatory Design
- Conversation Analysis
- Diary Studies
- Document and Artifact Analysis
- Experiment Sampling
- Field and In Situ Evaluation
- Focus Groups
- Interviews – in situ and in lab
- Market Analysis
- Online Activity Logging
- Participatory Observation
- Qualitative Data Analysis – culling, coding, classification, trends analysis
- Quantitative Data Analysis – data mining and visualization, statistical analyses
- Scenario Analysis & Show-and-Tell
- Shadowing
- Social Network Analysis
- Surveys
- Talk-aloud Protocols
- User Studies/ Cognitive Task Analysis
- Video Sampling & Audio Recording
|
|
