Rapid ethnography: time deepening strategies for HCI field research

By David R. Millen. Symposium on Designing Interactive Systems, 2000

600 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Field research methods are useful in the many aspects of Human-Computer Interaction research, including gathering user requirements, understanding and developing user models, and new product evaluation and iterative design. Due to increasingly short product realization cycles, there has been growing interestth in more time efficient methods, including rapid prototyping methods and various usability inspection techniques. This paper will introduce "rapid ethnography," which is a collection of field methods intended to provide a reasonable understanding of users and their activities given significant time pressures and limited time in the field.. The core elements include limiting or constraining the research focus and scope, using key informants, capturing rich field data by using multiple observers and interactive observation techniques, and collaborative qualitative data analysis. A short case study illustrating the important characteristics of rapid ethnography will also be presented.

Subfields: Human-Computer Interaction

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/16745a8d0f353337a212e8a71405b0c4de32959e

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In Human-Computer Interaction

Citations in the corpus

Design Study Methodology: Reflections from the Trenches and the Stacks (2012, background): “…an extensive literature review in the ﬁelds of human computer interaction (HCI) [7, 8, 9, 12, 16, 19, 20, 21, 22, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 38, 47, 57, 63, 64, 65, 83] and social science [6, 14, 18, 24, 32, 62, 81, 87, 93] in hopes of ﬁnding methodologies that we could apply directly to…”
Designing Formative Assessment Software with Teachers: an Analysis of the Co-Design Process (2007, methodology): “In documenting practice through fieldwork, " taking stock " in co-design has many similarities to rapid ethnographic techniques that are used in the design of workplace technologies (Hughes, King, Rodden & Andersen, 1995; Millen, 2000).”
Human Computer Interaction (2015, neutral): “The purposeful efforts of technology users, directed at finding and implementing optimal solutions for employing interactive technologies in their own habitats are variously conceptualized in HCI literature as end-user development [5], ephemeral innovations [13], exploring opportunity spaces [8], in”
Strategies for evaluating information visualization tools: multi-dimensional in-depth long-term case studies (2006, background): “Ethnographers join work or home environments to listen and observe carefully, sometimes stepping forward to ask questions and participate in activities [5][12][14][21].”
Designing robust and revisable policies for gender equality: lessons from the Australian construction industry (2015, methodology): “Stage 2 of the research project is designed to further analyze revisability and robustness by focusing on the informal rules at work, a task that will be undertaken via a ‘rapid ethnographic’ approach (Millen, 2000; Isaacs, 2013) which will include shadowing and close observations of behavior within”
Large‐scale science education intervention research we can use (2012, background): “In those fields, implementation research has influenced design through a family of practices that go by various names: contextual design (Beyer & Holtzblatt, 1997), rapid prototyping (Gorden & Bieman, 1995), and rapid ethnography (Millen, 2000).”
Beyond ethnography: engagement and reciprocity as foundations for design research out here (2014, background): “[13] that are quicker than those traditionally used in anthropology to more quickly come to understandings that can inform design.”
Reliability and Inter-rater Reliability in Qualitative Research (2019, background): “from other fields and contexts to the pace and structure of technology development and publication expectations [45,70].”