Ideas for Low Cost Ethnography

We've had several articles recently on ethnography and how it may work as a qualitative research tool for companies looking to develop new products or augment their current products. Ethnography is profoundly interesting, and one of the purest forms of data collection. One might even argue that ethnography is something that everyone – companies and individuals alike – engage in every day, watching how people interact with their environment and allowing it to improve decision making.

But applied ethnography can be an expensive and/or difficult endeavor. Companies need to be able to watch how people use products or engage in behaviors in order to learn from them, and that can be extremely time consuming and take a lot of money.

In addition, you run the risk of affecting the results of the ethnographic research, because your subjects are usually notified that they're being studied. So if you want to engage in ethnographic research but are unsure if you have the money or ability to finance it, here are a few ways you can try to collect some ethnographic data for cheap. Youtube – YouTube is absolutely one possibility.

While it may not work for every type of product, people seem to be taping themselves doing almost every type of behavior and activity, and posting those videos on the web for anyone to view. If you have the technical ability to comb through YouTube videos, you may find ample examples of people doing exactly what you would be studying if you did ethnographic data collection, and you can generate ideas from those videos accordingly. Twitter – Twitter is a little less visual, but not necessarily less informative.

On Twitter, you can see people's reactions to things in real time. For example, someone may tweet "can't get this soap package to open." Suddenly you know that they struggle opening packaging, and so creating an easier to open package may be a helpful part of your market. People Watching – Finally, you can simply have a few trained employees engaged in people watching and hope it bears fruit as a research method.

It's not a great method, mind you, because you can't get inside a person's home or follow them, but you can still watch people perform some behaviors and see if any ideas are generated, without running an official study. Ethnography may not be possible for every company, but there are ways that you can still complete it if you're hoping to use it for new product development.