With the keynote done and dusted, next up I took Track 2 with Chris Khalil (@Chris_Khalil), who presented a case study on ethnographic interview techniques used to develop a music site for News Digital Media.
Ethnographic interviews go beyond typical needs analysis, 'cultural probes' and workplace
observation; they capture everything a person does for the duration of the study. This was a solid session on how to be thorough, with lots of decent information, example software used, and I can totally empathise with Chris's Matrix analogy when it cam to analysing the findings. When you have a pile of interview data to distil it can be brain frying work, but it does begin to make sense once you get a decent handle on it.
Innovative use of technology such as Ethnio, Tumblr and Facebook to capture findings also made this worthwhile.
I would really have liked to have seen more on how Chris drew conclusions from the massive maps they created, and how they fed this back and the results achieved, but ultimately you can only discuss so much in a session. Overall my head was swmming with ideas towards the end.
You can read more on Chris's session on his blog, and the presentation slides should appear somewhere soon.
Next up, Matt Balara on agile design, or click here to see all related UX Australia posts and reviews.
