Advancing the Value of Ethnography

Tag: user experience

Toward Industrialization of Ethnography

Toward Industrialization of Ethnography

This paper explores a way to expand business using ethnography as an industrial service or product. First, a challenge that companies are facing and trying to deal with, which is industrialization is described. In the software industry, as computer prices go down, the requirements for software...

Re-evaluating Usability: Delivering Value via Research Practice

Re-evaluating Usability: Delivering Value via Research Practice

The thought of conducting a usability study may not excite most ethnographically minded researchers. While usability started out as the practical analysis of interactions with user interfaces, there has been an evolution toward devaluing such studies as more mechanical work. With the industry’s...

Regarding the Pain of Users: Towards a Genealogy of the Pain Point

This essay offers an analysis of the “pain point,” a commonplace figure of speech in UX design and contemporary business contexts more broadly. By situating this everday trope within a wider discourse of pain, and its politiciztion in the United States, I seek to problematize the modes of...