Ethnography, User Observation, and Interviews

Incorporating everyday knowledge in user experience design is fundamental for developing digital technologies that can improve people’s lives. Deploying ethnography, user observation, and interviews, HCI researchers can move beyond a focus on individual users’ interaction with a system and consider the broader social and cultural contexts in which technology is used. Through these methodologies, hypotheses are developed that can be transferred into design specifications. The aim of this chapter is to describe in practice ethnography, user observation and interviews for the HCI field. It provides a description of each methodology, evidence of exemplary applications for user experience design, main advantages, recommendations for overcoming limitations, and for data analysis. It concludes by introducing personas as an epistemological tool to represent the kind of knowledge produced through field observations and interviews as a practical tool that can guide user experience design.