"A startup is a human institution design to deliver a new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty"

- Eric Reis

Malkovich Bias

The tendency to believe that everyone uses technology exactly like you do.

Lean Startup (and LeanUX) is a risk mitigation strategy

A Dirty Secret

People being either idiots or lazy

Proxies Suck!

Ethnography, WTF?

Why Ethnography

Complexity is everywhereEthnography offers a way to make sense of this complexity.

It lets us see beyond our preconceptions and immerse ourselves in the world of others. Most importantly, it allows us to see patterns of behavior in a real world context – patterns that we can understand both rationally and intuitively.

“If you want to understand what motivates a girl to pick up a skateboard, you could bring her into a sterile laboratory and interrogate her… or you could spend a week in a skatepark observing her interacting with her friends, practicing new skills and having fun.”

Ethnography + Design

Lean Ethnography?

Most teams practicing Lean Startup don't start with a customer hypothesis; they work backwards from a solution hypothesis

Because teams start with a solution hypothesis, it's almost impossible for them to generate multiple hypotheses for testing

If GOOB is not conducted in the appropriate context, it almost never yields useful behavioral data

GOOB relies far too heavily on self-reporting, which is almost useless.

GOOB, when done poorly, is particularly prone to confirmation bias

Most teams have a very hard time formulating assumptions as hypotheses

Designing reliable experiments is a skill that takes time to learn

People new to customer research are really bad at listening for weak signals

When a customer interview is guided, it almost never provides opportunity for serendipitous insights to emerge

Design research as a systemic approach

Design ethnography allows us to

1. Discover the semantics of living

Context is king

Self-reporting is mostly shit

People's hacks are a great insight

8 Steps in Ethnographic Research

1. Define your customer hypothesis

2. Identify the people to validate they exist

3. Plan your approach

4. Conduct Paired Research

#ShoeUpBitches

5. Become a "habit-farmer"

6. Search for Patterns & Themes

7. Co-Generate & Share Insights

8. Perform your narrative

7 Keys to good ethnography

Delve deeply into the context, lives, cultures, and rituals of a few people rather than study a large number of

people superficially.

Holistically study people’s behaviors and experiences in daily life. You

won't find this in a lab, focus group, or 5 minute interview on the street.

Learn to ask probing, open questions, gathering as much data as possible to

inform your understanding.

Practice “active seeing,” and “active listening.” Record every minutiae of

daily existence, and encode on post-its.

Use digital tools for asynchronous data gathering: tumblr, facebook, twitter,

instagram

Use collaborative sense-making activities like the Cynefin framework and affinity diagramming for active

sensemaking.

Map the stories from insights back to the original problem.

Did it validate or invalidate the customer hypothesis?

Now you can think about your Solution Hypothesis

Did the new insights provide potentially richer opportunities

to solve?

Thanks!Will EvansChief Design OfficerPraxisFlow@semanticwill