Overview

Ethnographers have contributed to industry as organizational consultants and in mediating labor disputes for the better part of a century. In addition, they have contributed to the design of commercial products since well before the software era. Companies and industries as varied as General Motors Corp (Kane, 1996), Kimberly-Clark (Feldman, 1999), Nokia (Lindholm et al., 2003), and Motorola (Kupfer, 2000) all have long seen the value of ethnographic research in product design. Creating products that resonate with the buying public, that fill the wants and needs of consumers and that create loyal returning customers is the aspiration of commerce. It rarely happens serendipitously. Investing in research designed to identify the customer's core values, cares, and desires and to establish a deep understanding of how the product or service will be incorporated into the consumer's life is time and money well spent, indeed, it is invaluable. The business principle is a simple one: to create a product or service that consumers love, you must first understand those customers on the most fundamental level. Find or create a need and then offer the solution that touches on key fundamental values.

The first use of this principle for software was when Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) hired Eleanor Wynn in 1976. PARC was actively engaged in developing software for their leading-edge personal computing systems that foreshadowed the IBM PC and...