IDEAS

Contextual observation: a technique in style

Abril 11th 2006Maritza Guaderrama. Online Research Director.

Leer este artículo en español: LA OBSERVACIÓN CONTEXTUAL, UNA TÉCNICA DE MODA

 

It is more and more frequent for marketing and technology managers to be concerned in getting to know the everyday, day to day habits of the users of their services and devices - mobiles, PCs, consoles, PDA's-. The idea is that in those currently "invisible" moments of everyday life there are hidden possibilities for innovation and potential market niches.

The qualitative techniques such as the discussion group and the in-depth interview are useful to explore human attitudes, but always from "that said about things". The practical scope, meaning, "what is done with things" are left out from these techniques.

Here is a nineteenth century - but not out of style- science such as Anthropology that seems to provide the ideal technique to submerge into the intersect lives of people and human groups, where other qualitative methods do not reach. This is the ethnography technique.

From ethnography to contextual observation

The problems with ethnography as a method applied to marketing and technological innovation are, mainly, time and cost. An ethnographist is basically a technical analyst that submerges himself during months or years into a certain culture or group to "observe" and "describe" what the people do, how they act and how they interact among themselves, to be able to understand their beliefs, values, motivations and perspectives in the context in which these are produced.

Expressed this way it is possible to understand the cost of anthropological ambition, keeping in mind that the time and the budgets of company investigation departments are limited. To overcome this obstacle, another technique has been developed, the contextual observation , which tries to establish a commitment between the holistic pretension of ethnography and the companies' strategic requirements.

The main advantage of the contextual observation compared to the statistics techniques and other qualitative techniques is in that it allows the complexity of human behaviour to be understood and this is crucial if we are looking to find new opportunities in the market by means of innovation.

Its main disadvantage is that it is not a simple and cheap method as it is tried to be sold in the technical and marketing circuits. Why? Well, because there is something that is required by the contextual observation, on one hand, an iron seeing discipline and, on the other hand, put our eyesight the furthest away from our navels to understand the "other" in its context, without prejudice or preconceived ideas.

The contextual observation minimum requirements

The work of the "observer" consists in systematic and thorough obsessiveness collect all the actions, comments, behaviours and details of the human beings observed and then later, in a second analysis separate all the patterns concurrent to the individual practices or idiosyncrasies, understand what meaning or sense the "different ways of doing things" have, find the inherent contradictions in all human action, etc.

In an international study with contextual observation that we recently did on recreational practices in the home, suddenly a question came up; what does a young and modern professional have in common with a traditional housewife in Spain? Some of the information surprised us: a 3 seater sofa, its same placement in a living room, a piece of furniture in front of it with a television of more than 27", a DVD in the shelf below it and on the one below that a video covered by a obvious layer of dust. What did this mean?....

Any observation in context that tries to understand and describe a person or a group requires a minimum of 20 effective hours of visual and discussion contact with the "observers", besides another type of information collection such as personal diaries, projective techniques, etc.

Even though working in small samples of 5 to 6 informants correctly selected and prepared to collaborate, it is not sufficient to have a notepad and a pen to do the study as I have heard said. On the contrary to what is sometimes sold of this technique, it is necessary to prepare a tool for the collection of information: a field diary, guides, observation templates, interview or discussion guides. All this to guarantee the quality of the information collected and the distancing of the observer to the observed.

In the international study I mentioned, only when we shared the observation diaries of Spain , United Kingdom and Germany did we realize that our young professional and housewife used the living room in a different manner than their English of German counterparts. The Spanish living room is the place in the house that brings together the whole family for the consumption and shared use of certain cultural services (news, series, movies) and of certain leisure devices (TV, DVD, console). This is completely different in the other countries. The design of any "family" leisure offer here has to pass in thinking of this space as "the environment". If we had overlooked the description of the living rooms we visited due to considering them something obvious (as an everyday occurrence), we would not have provided our client with a central piece of information on how to design and sell its service in Spain.

Care with the "Fast Food" technique

In the innovation and design field focused on the user, the idea circulates that “the observation of users in their environment is a simple and cheap technique but is used in few projects. You only need a notepad, a pen and a bit of methodology"... Nothing farther from the truth!

This "McDonalds" definition of the contextual observation which is in strongly in circulation is subject to various serious problems.

• First, it does not deal with the observation of “users”. The main twist that must be made by the technician that applies this method is in its way of looking and consists in understanding that it fights with complex agents that do not "use" the service or devices, but integrate them into their way of life.
• Secondly, we must understand the "environment" is a space-time covered by the technician, whose definition far from being simple, implies limitations in terms of completeness of the observation and collection of information... To where does the environment reach when we talk about the use of a telephone or a mobile console, which are "mobiles" by definition?
• The simplicity and the low cost attributed to the contextual observation are the main signs that the technique has not been understood properly. One thing is what a "notepad" and a "pen" costs and another is how much time is needed and when and who uses them.
• Additionally the "little methodology" needed consists in, at least, knowing the interpretative frames provided by anthropology (of course!), social and cognitive psychology, microsociology, semiotics, literary analysis and sociolinguistics. And t his, without getting fancy.