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THE CASE
The underlying case for the analysis presented in this paper is a research study at an annual advent fair in Linköping, Sweden. The researchers had been invited to contribute with insights on the visitor’s experience of the fair, insights which could aid in the renewal of the fair offering in upcoming years.
The advent fair is held in a small neighborhood called Gamla Linköping – “Old Linköping” -, which also is an open air museum. The neighborhood was constructed in the 1950’s as Linköping, like most other Swedish towns, was modernized in terms of building standard (Gamla Linköping, n.d.). The neighborhood consists of houses originally built in other parts of Linköping, but rather than being torn down they were moved to Gamla Linköping. The neighborhood is meant to give its’ visitors a feeling of what a Swedish town looked like in the early 20th century. Some smaller adaptions to modern life have however been done, such as opening up a gravel path in the streets to ease the pushing of trolleys and replicas of old houses being built from scratch.
The advent fair is held every year on the first advent weekend in cooperation with the local Lions Club. Being held only two days a year, the fair introduced a strong temporal constraint on how the research could be conducted. However, the fair is a popular event with around 15000 people visiting it the study year, meaning that there was a large pool of potential study participants to draw from. Taking the time constraints and the unique environment of the fair into account it was decided to use several approaches to understand the visitor’s experience of the fair. Three different research approaches were used (Social Anthropology, Interaction Design and Mobile Ethnography), each with a brief corresponding to what could be expected had they been hired as consultants directly by the fair management. Each approach is described in further detail in the next section.
THE THREE ETHNOGRAPHIES
After the decision had been made to use multiple approaches, the researchers decided to set up a study which would produce data from different theoretical approaches. The researchers having access to the beta-version of a Mobile Ethnography application, it was decided to conduct an experiment where different ethnographic styles would be compared.
Mobile Ethnography is a still emerging method, which led to the decision to use two other approaches with varying degree of maturation. Returning to the roots of ethnography to use anthropologists was quickly decided upon as the most mature approach. Considering the authors work in UCD, and the Mobile Ethnography app being inspired by service design, the UCD approach to ethnography, in form of interaction design, was chosen as the mid-point maturity wise.
In the following sections the approaches used by the fieldworkers coming from the different theoretical starting points are expanded upon. We do not claim that the teams conducting the research for this project are necessarily ‘typical’ or ‘representative’ of how these approaches should be applied.
Social Anthropology
Two thesis students in Social Anthropology were recruited as fieldworkers. Their project brief was to do a study according to the tradition of Social Anthropology which could aid in the improvement of the visitor’s experience of the advent fair in coming years. The Social Anthropology head at Linköping University volunteered to be the advisor of the theses, (and to summarize their contents). The description of the approach of the social anthropologists below is based on his report (Alm, 2012) as well as the two finished theses (Karlsson, 2012; Nyman, 2012).
Both students followed a similar approach in their work. They started out by narrowing down the broad brief to match their research interests; in Hanna Karlsson’s case she focused on the shopping experience of her informants and Mikaela Nyman focused on Gamla Linköping as a reconstructed past. This was followed by a broad phase where they acquainted themselves with literature on their thesis topics, Gamla Linköping as a field work site and finding informants. Aided by insights from the literature studies both anthropologists conducted semi-structured interviews with their informants.
The interviews were then transcribed with the aim of finding reoccurring themes and verifying/falsifying the insights from the literature study. The emerging themes were used as a foundation for participatory observations of the informants’ visits to the advent fair.
Thereafter the anthropologists analyzed the material from their observations and compared it with the insights from the interviews. They then re-visited their informants with follow up questions to clarify issues which were unclear. The answers from the follow up questions were integrated into the rest of the analysis, producing the end result analysis wise.
Interaction Design
The interaction designers in the project were chosen to match the anthropologists experience-wise. The six students enrolled in the final Interaction Design course given to master students in cognitive science were given the brief to develop concept ideas for interactive artifacts, based on the wishes and driving forces of the visitors to the advent fair. The user research and presentation of it was stressed as a key learning moment in the brief. As (interaction) designers usually work in teams, the group was divided into two teams. Each team was given free choice in planning their ethnographic work. This resulted in the two teams conducting somewhat different tasks.
One team decided to do benchmarking of other advent fairs, to use structured interviews to interview people at the fair and to recruit two groups of friends to interview prior and after their visit to the advent fair as well as to shadow them during their fair visits. One group was shadowed at the advent fair in Gamla Linköping, and another at a competing fair. As the group analyzed their material they did however mostly use the interviews, and the team even states that “we’ve only used a small section of the observation data” (author’s translation) in their project report. The questions asked focused on the motivations for visiting the fair, what was bought and how/if the informants searched for information about the fair prior to visiting it. The analysis and synthesis led the team to creating two personas1.
The other team started out by formulating hypotheses about what would be interesting aspects to study, formulating two questionnaires based on this. The focus was narrowed further by concentrating on two user groups; families with young children and retired people. The team had initially aimed at getting 30 questionnaires back from each group, but experienced difficulties in recruiting people on-site, only managing to get 29 questionnaires answered in total during the first day of the fair. The team thus decided to do undirected observations during the second day of the fair. Like the other team, they focused on the more tangible data, letting the observations take a backseat in the analysis. The analysis and synthesis of one of the questionnaires led them to create three user profiles, after having weighted the questions during the analysis. The team did not find any clear patterns in the second questionnaire.
Mobile Ethnography
The third research approach of the study was to use a smartphone application, in which the participants documented their visit to the advent fair without the researchers being present. The creators of the app have dubbed this approach Mobile Ethnography(Stickdorn, Frischhut, & Schmid, 2012): “[m]obile ethnography is a research approach to identify, evaluate and document the customer journey through a smartphone application” (Frischhut, Stickdorn, & Zehrer, 2012, p. 161).
Although not explicitly dealt with by the creators of the app used, this approach relates to ethnographic discussions on multi-sited ethnography (Marcus, 1995), autoethnography (Anderson, 2006, and comments; Solomon, 2010) and ethno-mining (Anderson, Nafus, Rattenbury, & Aippersbach, 2009).
myServiceFellow – The app myServiceFellow2 (mSF) is developed by a research group focusing on service design for tourism. The motivation for developing the app is that a holiday maker’s experience of the trip starts when the trip is planned and isn’t finished until they arrive at home again – tourism destinations need to understand this to be able to deliver a top-notch experience. Stickdorn, Frischhut & Schmid (2012) highlight the difficulties of getting this holistic view by only interacting with the holiday makers at the destination, as the holiday is a journey through many geographical places (the same kind of issues discussed around multi-sited ethnography).
The approach of the mSF-development team to issues of multi-sited ethnography is to let the holiday maker’s document their own holiday (relating both to autoethnography3 and the design probes approach (Mattelmäki, 2006)). The holiday makers are guided in documenting their holiday by a smartphone app, built according to the customer journey metaphor used in service design. The users of mSF add new data points, called touchpoints in the app, at their own discretion as note-worthy events occur:
“It is the guests who decide what is a touchpoint during their individual customer journeys and it is them who evaluate and document those by adding text messages, pictures, videos or audio files besides meta data such as date, time and GPS position” (Stickdorn, Frischhut, & Schmid, 2012, p. 7)
As shown in the quote above the app makes use of the functionality available in modern smartphones, such as allowing the users to create video and photo material (see Faulkner & Zafiroglu, 2010, for a discussion on benefits of user-generated video and photo material) as well as ethno-mining of the holiday maker’s movements.
Once the holiday maker has finished her holiday and uploaded the material, it becomes available to the project owners in the back-end of mSF, which is called ServiceFollow. All users’ materials are shown in a chronological order by default, together with their rating of the occasion (ratings go from -2 to +2). ServiceFollow provides the project owners numerous ways of interacting with the material; re-sorting, varying degrees of detail, accessing images and videos, grouping of touchpoints and a map view (based on GPS-position) among others.
Methodology – The mSF-study used a mixture of pre-recruited and on-site recruited participants. A total of 26 respondents uploaded data from the advent fair. Three support personnel were available at the advent fair to support the participants who needed assistance. This team also handled the on-site recruitment by approaching visitors as they entered Gamla Linköping.
The participants were informed that the insights gathered through the tool were going to be used to suggest improvements for upcoming advent fairs.