1. “When people drop their phone, they view it as, ‘I dropped my phone!’ They blame themselves,” Bogard explains. “What you see for something worn on the body is, people don’t even think about it.” […] Their own internal product testing was coupled with what Jawbone calls “one of the largest ethnographic studies you could imagine.” While they say most consumer gadgets might see eight weeks of limited field testing, theirs lasted 46 weeks, or just short of 3 million hours of beta testers living with the Up. […] it was ultimately “hundreds and hundreds of different designs, each being tested one by one” that evolved the Up into what’s returning to store shelves today. How 3 Million Hours Of User-Testing Fixed The Jawbone Up

    “When people drop their phone, they view it as, ‘I dropped my phone!’ They blame themselves,” Bogard explains. “What you see for something worn on the body is, people don’t even think about it.” […]

    Their own internal product testing was coupled with what Jawbone calls “one of the largest ethnographic studies you could imagine.” While they say most consumer gadgets might see eight weeks of limited field testing, theirs lasted 46 weeks, or just short of 3 million hours of beta testers living with the Up. […]

    it was ultimately “hundreds and hundreds of different designs, each being tested one by one” that evolved the Up into what’s returning to store shelves today.

    How 3 Million Hours Of User-Testing Fixed The Jawbone Up

  2. One could argue that seeing the future through a developer lens and not one of digital anthropology, sociology or ethnography is why Google has wrestled with opportunities to socialize new and existing products. While Facebook builds and ships it must also continue to explore the intersection of technology and liberal arts to build and ship in ways that continue to define or redefine how people discover, connect, and share.

    — 4 Areas Where Facebook Must Focus Post-IPO

  3. Ana Chang, a researcher for Facebook’s Photos feature, has been conducting a series of in-home interviews over the last few months. The goal? To discover why people feel the way they do about their photographs.  The general idea is that we focus on getting to know a few people very, very well. We sit down and really talk to a person about what motivates them. We start with the basic, concrete things but then we move on to their needs and desires and aspirations, and how these things fit into the context of everything else in their lives. We’re trying to get an idea of the individual cultural and social factors driving the decisions that lead to specific behaviors. Inside the Facebook Research Team’s In-Home Visits

    Ana Chang, a researcher for Facebook’s Photos feature, has been conducting a series of in-home interviews over the last few months. The goal? To discover why people feel the way they do about their photographs. 

    The general idea is that we focus on getting to know a few people very, very well. We sit down and really talk to a person about what motivates them. We start with the basic, concrete things but then we move on to their needs and desires and aspirations, and how these things fit into the context of everything else in their lives. We’re trying to get an idea of the individual cultural and social factors driving the decisions that lead to specific behaviors.

    Inside the Facebook Research Team’s In-Home Visits

  4. Right now for example, we’re trying to do a lot of ethnographic studies around different demographics. I think today a bunch of people are going out and interviewing a lot of new mothers and the experience of having a new baby and how you want to share that with your family and friends is really important.

    A lot of times people use Facebook to communicate weddings, engagements, the birth of family and so we really wanted to understand what do people want to do, how are they feeling, like what are the things that they want to share and express? So the research team is diving a lot more deeply into trying to understand these market segments so that we can use that to affect the strategic decisions that we’re making around and about how do we do photos, or how do we do newsfeed, or how do we do profile.

    — Podcast of Julie Zhuo’s talk on How Facebook Uses Data

  5. This question sparked deep user studies at Google on mobile phone use, what Matias described as “Serious baseline ethnographic research which hadn’t happened before.” He tells me that the company spent a great deal of time and effort watching how and why regular people used their smartphones. Not just Android phones, but all smartphones. The company even had employees “shadow” users, visiting them at their homes and workplaces to watch how they interacted with their devices.

    — Matias Duarte on the philosophy of Android, and an in-depth look at Ice Cream Sandwich

  6. Facebook’s first user researcher joined in 2007… Recently studied identity and what people feel comfortable sharing through ethnographic studies. Also studied local businesses to tailor pages product to these smaller businesses. The end results of qualitative research are insights on how people feel and what they think. This funnels into higher-level strategy.

    — Web App Masters: Data & Design at Facebook