Ethnography is often described as the process of discovering the unknown. In ethnography research, you take on the role of the intrepid explorer and travel to the natural working or living environment of your users. This form of research is great for observing and inquiring about behavior (What do you do?), motivation (Why do you do it?) and cognition (How do you think about what you need and what you do?).

It gives a lot of insight into context, which can be hard to get from other, more formal testing techniques. Learning more about this context helps us to understand how it affects the user experience, especially outside of lab conditions, controlled interviews and tests.

The key here is to spot and capture the "A-ha!" moments while discovering user motivations.

Imagine that you're building a product to improve the ergonomic posture of office workers. Ethnographic research would be a valuable tool, perhaps even more so than user interviews. You would set yourself a goal of visiting offices to observe users "in the wild" and to see whether the problem exists. You might also visit a range of different offices, too: startup offices, coworking spaces, as well as the typical big corporate offices.

Conducting ethnography research helps you to see whether the problem is real and perhaps even to uncover new problems so that you can pivot the idea. Ethnographic research is a complex field that goes beyond what we've touched on so far. Take a deep dive into the practice by reading more about it .