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 NEWSThe human touch By Eve Epstein May 26, 2000 1:01 pm PT SHANE WALL is quick to admit that he was skeptical about working with anthropologists, psychologists, and other social scientists when he first encountered them at Intel two years ago. As an electrical engineer with a computer science background, he had doubts about what those trained in the "soft sciences" could bring to the table when it came to product development.
Ethnographers and industrial psychologists have long been involved in projects at some of the better-known "think tanks," such as Bell Labs or Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (XeroxPARC). The auto industry has used them for years. And although their ranks are still small in high tech, the demand for social scientists is growing -- especially in product development -- for everything from e-commerce to high-tech appliances. The ethnographic method has value for any company trying to develop products that rely on broad user acceptance for success, from office and desktop appliances to business-to-consumer and business-to-business Web sites. For CTOs looking to navigate between a company's technical demands and its business strategies, ethnographers can provide unique insights. So if you don't have an ethnographer on staff yet at your company, you may want to prepare for the day when your CTO brings one on board as a key member of your product development team. The diversity of participants at the Intel Conference on Human-Centered Product Innovation earlier this year gave some indication of just how much interest there is in this approach. Participants included representatives from Xerox, IDEO, Lotus, Sapient, Motorola Labs, Compaq's business and critical server division, and Bigstep.com, a San Francisco-based e-commerce company that helps small businesses. As director of Intel's new business development division and general manager of the company's applications and services development lab, Wall wouldn't consider starting a new project without the social-science perspective -- and neither would other IT members of his development team. "Now it's getting to where the technical people themselves want to pull in the ethnographers and social scientists," Wall says. What's the difference between the ethnographic approach and a standard marketing approach? Instead of using focus groups or survey methods to learn what potential customers say they want, ethnographers go out and study behavior to see how people actually use technology and how they live. Carmen Egido, director of Intel's Applications Research Lab, in Hillsboro, Ore., oversees a group that includes about a dozen social scientists and designers. "Our charter is to discover new uses and new applications for computing power and to enable new users," she says. In addition to working with Intel designers, Egido's group often works with other companies that have partnered with Intel to create new products. Sometimes the social scientists' findings are surprising and go against the initial intuitions of engineers and designers. For example, Egido's group was asked to take a look at "boundary retirees" (people who were either getting ready to retire or who retired recently) to see how technology might best serve their needs. The retirees were a good bet for a lucrative market: They had disposable income and time on their hands. The social scientists found that retirees had a strong desire to maintain connections with family and friends as they started leaving the workforce, and they wanted to find a way to pass their legacies and their stories on to the next generation. The product that was developed from this research is now being marketed as Slowmotion, a "tremendously easy storytelling tool," Egido says. Slowmotion was launched jointly by Intel and Tripod, a Web company focusing on content-creation technologies. One of the social scientists' big findings in developing Slowmotion was that simplicity is the key to success. That was initially difficult for some of the technical people on the development team to swallow, Egido says. "The big 'aha' was that we had spent years developing incredible multiple capabilities that might as well not exist because people couldn't access them," Egido says. But the social scientists brought back videotaped evidence that the simpler technology was more likely to be a winner with the retirees. "That became obvious from the footage that we brought back of people using our prototype tool vs. other tools at the time, which were largely aimed at professional content developers. We hit the target," Egido says. That impulse toward simplicity is sometimes the hardest thing for technical staffers to accept, acknowledged Wall, the engineer. "Sometimes the ethnographic studies reveal a very simple function and that simple function requires very few bells and whistles," Wall says. "But the temptation is still there to put them in." Ken Anderson, an anthropologist who works at MediaOne, a leading broadband services company based in Englewood, Colo., says the ideal technology doesn't call attention to itself. "We'd like to design for invisibility, like electricity or the hum of your refrigerator. The things you don't notice are really good designs," Anderson says. Anderson and his wife, Anne McClard, are anthropologists who have worked with high-tech companies for years. They met in graduate school at Brown University, and after doing anthropological field work in the Azores they went on to work for Apple Computer. McClard then went to work for US West while Anderson worked part-time. Now they both work for MediaOne. "The ideal technologies are things that just fit into people's lives and the way they already do things," McClard says. In many situations, the ethnographic approach looks for ways that technology can fit with people's existing behaviors rather than asking people to change to fit the technology. To that end, ethnographers often use videotapes of people in their natural environments -- at home or at work, as opposed to a laboratory setting -- to demonstrate their behavior. In this way they try to present a full portrait of real people instead of a portrait of some anonymous "user." "When you label something as 'users,' it takes on a uniformity that doesn't exist," McClard says. Or, in Anderson's words: "If you design for everyone, you're really designing for no one." McClard has had a variety of experiences working with people from IT backgrounds. Some have been productive, but others have been difficult. "In the environment we're in [now], the technical folks buy in to the way we're working," McClard says. "We belong to a very interdisciplinary group. There have been other instances in my experience in industry where basically the technical folks didn't buy in to anything. I think it just depends on the work culture you're in." Jack Whalen, principal scientist at XeroxPARC, who was trained in sociology at the University of Oregon in Eugene, is the only social scientist on his team. All the other members are computer scientists or software engineers. Currently they're looking at ways to improve technology for people who work remotely, either from home or in their cars. Whalen says he wasn't interested in studying class or gender or race, the kinds of questions that motivated many of his colleagues. "I was fascinated by the ordinary, mundane behavior of human beings," he says. Whalen likes the collaborative spirit that results from a multidisciplinary team, even if there are some frustrations. "It's true that the people trained in social sciences have a very different background," Whalen says, adding that the differing perspectives have led to difficult moments. "It's not as if it's all been sweetness and light here." But Whalen says he enjoys the challenge. "There has to be a learning curve on both sides," he says. "You have to change. Sometimes that's hard for social scientists to do. They're good at critiquing what computer scientists do and why this device is hard to use and how this system doesn't work ... you have to step outside your critiquing role and step into the nitty-gritty of making something work." Whalen believes that social scientists are in demand now more than ever because technology is becoming more and more interactive. In the past the focus has been on how individuals interact with machines, he says. "What's left out is any serious attention to the fact that human beings live in communities and are part of a social world, and the machines we build are part of that world." Send comments on this article to Eve Epstein at eve_epstein@infoworld.com.
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