Rhetoric and Experience Architecture by Liza Potts

Author:Liza Potts
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Rhetoric;Architecture;teaching;technology;user design;universal design;user-experience design
Publisher: Parlor Press, LLC
Published: 2021-11-18T21:49:39+00:00

10 Ethnography as Research Aggregator

Andrew Mara and Miriam Mara

When one puts XA research methods on a timeline of the design process, there are few places that a kind of XA research method could not be used to gather information to improve the design process. The front-end steps of internal discovery and user identification and the back-end steps of usability only form two bookends on a broad spectrum of research methods that can be conducted to help design teams create compelling and usable products and services for users. The challenge that this wide array of possible research presents, however, is the very real danger of research incoherency, and a set of ambiguities that can derail the design process if there aren’t ways to reconcile different kinds of data. One way that XA designers can coherently connect the gap between key XA user research methods—contextual design and qualitative surveys and interviews—is through the use of ethnography. Conducting and incorporating the thick description of extensive observation and interaction into their XA research can help practitioners create a sense of coherence in their collections of user data. This chapter outlines the data collection methods of ethnography, describes the writing practices that inhere in this anthropological approach to research, and demonstrates how these are connected through an illustrative case study of two iterations of a mobile-technology-inflected art event. Because the practice of ethnography has blended both observation and participation, the philosophy behind this practice can help UX researchers invent more useful research protocols, participant heuristics, and contextual inquiry interactions. The generative interaction of ethnography can additionally help UX researchers represent their data as topoi, personas, affinity diagrams, or other audience-sensitive representations.

To give the reader a feel for the usefulness of ethnographic practices, it is important to first give a brief overview of interview design and framing, field preparation, interviewing, data capture and evaluation, and insight deployment. All of these steps are designed to help the UX researcher better envision, collect, and shape their data to understand their users and their audiences better. In addition, this chapter will foreground how ethnography provides a rhetorical orientation towards what can be a dizzying array of data. Experience Architects form and design pathways that users experience—a system which sometimes, but not always, includes computer-human interaction. Building on an Aristotelian instrumental understanding of individual types, by inflecting it with human-shaped data, the Experience Architect can blend the in-media-res perspective of the user with the goals of other stakeholders to better understand the relationship between attitude and activity. Ethnography allows the Experience Architecture researcher to reconnect user perception with the aggregation of habits and pathways that these users take through data. Additionally, ethnography synthesizes a triple focus on individual motivation, connections, and interactions that are necessary for any XA project to succeed.

XA research can have a distinctly Aristotelian feel, with both the use of themes and topoi, and appeals to (temporarily) typed people. Yet, XA research is ultimately driven by a belief in the ability to make any product, and argument, better and the willingness to prioritize data insights by situating them in human practice.

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