Case Study: Ethnography for Persona Development
The Project
The Home Depot department of End User Computing is responsible for the delivery of all digital devices for use with their corporate customers. Leadership, however, had discovered they were uniquely unaware of how these devices were onboarded with staff and how they were managed within other corporate departments. They doubted whether new productivity software and other EUC offerings were easy to find, use, or incorporate into existing computing habits. It was believed a set of personas would help EUC staff to understand their audience and relieve their IT help desk from nuisance tickets and enhance the EUC brand.
The Objective
EUC desired a set of archetypal profiles and I was brought on to conduct the appropriate study and training on how to replicate the tasks of generating new profiles. The profiles would be helpful in discussions between UX designers and engineers revolving around IT culture, existing corporate silos, user behaviors / preconceptions, and streamlined communications between the help desk and end consumers.
The Work
Some work by their internal team existed but they had attempted to organize their study group taxonomically by job title. It was soon discovered the scope of a proposed study was far too expansive and results would be so broad as to be unenlightening. I directed the work to align more closely with an ethnographic study instead of the research that would be done for marketing-styled personas. This would help the development teams and leadership understand their end consumers more in behavioral outcomes. Hallmarks of the anticipated work would include:
— Contextual interviews
— Relevant narratives
— Realistic outcomes describing actual behaviors
— Unique profiles based on qualitative results
— Objectives based on (internal) cultural behaviors
The Results
The contextual interviews were eye-opening to EUC staff. The proto-personas I developed at the beginning of the study proved to be insightful in revealing underlying behaviors of THD’s corporate associates. The engineering members of EUC became orthodox in their evaluation of respondents, their corporate sensibilities, and how end-users interacted with EUC and IT help desk. This allowed staff to anticipate future “problems” their corporate community might run into, how IT help desk could be proactive in addressing those problems, and provide front-end communications to address typical challenges about devices and business software.
Proto-Persona example
