Interview with Microsoft Ethnographer Tracey Lovejoy

By Kelly Goto

Lately, it seems the terms anthropology and ethnography are the new buzzwords for innovation in the technology industry. How has this type of research helped global organizations such as Intel, Microsoft, Apple and Adobe create better products and services? In this interview, we ask Ethnographer Tracey Lovejoy to detail some of the ways her team's research practice has directly integrated into the design and development cycles at Microsoft. In this interview, Tracey reveals how designers, developers, technologists and strategists in the technology field and beyond can most effectively utilize ethnographic-based research in their daily practices.

Q: What inspired you to start working in the field of ethnography and how did you start working in the technology industry?
I did my Master's work at the University of Chicago in an interdisciplinary social science program - MAPSS - focusing on anthropology and ethnographic methods. I was turned off by some aspects of the academic world and began searching for alternatives. First I explored Sapient, but the dot.com crash ended that dream. Then I met Anne Cohen Kiel (now Anne Kirah) who was an anthropologist at Microsoft. Who knew that Microsoft had anthropologists? It had never occurred to me! She chatted with me about practicing in industry, one thing led to another, and I started working for her. I laugh thinking back to my early days: I was straight out of the academy and the first report I produced was 117 pages long! Now, five years later, I think in terms of bullets and PowerPoint.

Q: How does your work bridge the gap between the academic and corporate world?
Microsoft is a company where people are really really smart - however it has traditionally been a technology-driven company. This mentality is shifting to a customer-centered strategy, with ethnography and anthropology as a major part of the shift. Instead of thinking of the technology first and applying it later, we put the customer right at the center of everything we do. People with anthropology training have the resources to do this well. We are the closest to the people we want to serve on an everyday level. We need to maintain the reality of the people we want to target and not go so 'native' with the technology. Five years later, it is such a clear pairing. Understanding human behavior is the starting point, not the end result.

Q: At Microsoft, how does your work help to create more lifestyle-oriented products and services?
By putting the customer at the center of everything we do. My goal is to understand people's lives and behaviors, then infuse this understanding throughout the development process to help build products that more directly meet people's needs and mold to their lives—and ideally, even improve their lives. But doing good research is just the first step. I'm responsible for making sure the people who actually build the product, such as developers and program managers, deeply understand our customers and integrate those learnings into the product. I've done my job when those deep customer understandings have been incorporated into our products and team processes.

Q: Can you comment on the way the Social Anthropology and Ethnography fields have matured in the past several years and why they are becoming so popular at companies like Microsoft?
While it is true that corporate anthropology and ethnography have evolved, I also believe companies are maturing too. In today's competitive and global market, companies are increasingly finding it necessary to deeply understand their customer and build their products accordingly. Anthropology is a discipline with a long history of studying people and understanding their lives in the contexts of their normal environments in cultures around the world. This is a natural fit with the trend toward deeply understanding customers around the globe.

Q: How do you infuse international awareness into your product lines?
Sixty percent of Windows revenue comes from international markets. Clearly we need to focus on markets outside of the US. However, the challenge is that 40% of the revenue is coming from one single country (USA), while the rest is spread across 190-something countries (the exact number depends on who you ask). The question then becomes how to infuse the concept of 'international' into the process in a meaningful and not randomizing way. For example requirements in one market may completely contradict that of another market, so you can't just throw data at the product team. We strive to find a systematic way to use global data in a meaningful way. Often our globalization strategy is a matter of taking the 'lowest common denominator', making sure that we meet global requirements, and sometimes holding back on going to the next level of market customization. We strive to instead move to that next level of consciousness and "local-ness".

As an example, for the new release of Vista, we're observing 40 families in the U.S. and 12 families globally — two families each in Germany, Finland, India, Japan, Israel and Mexico. We're getting live feedback to see how the product works in people's homes. When creating globalized products, the study of human behavior and culture offer rich insights. Many companies are approaching the international market by focusing first on BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China). Currently, India and China are the most highly targeted markets. Both have large populations and a rapidly growing middle class.

Q: How does ethnographic work create innovation in the technology industry?
Ethnographic work helps show where unarticulated opportunities exist. We closely observe people and look where their current systems break down; in other words we see gaps that are waiting to be filled. If they're turned into a solution, that's where you see innovation. Innovation is not always cool, new and flashy. It's sometimes solving simple problems in new ways, like the 'big button' that Xerox Parc put on copier machines.

Q: What specific practices and methodologies do you feel are the most important to consider when actually developing and conducting a study?
The key methods involved in business ethnography are observation, interview and participatory design. Your key goals and questions should always direct the methods you use and in what combination.

Q: What are some of the most memorable insights you've gathered from your research?
Every study has unique and exciting insights. But perhaps the most surprising was working with truckers. It was part of a larger study exploring 'blind spots', or areas about which we had little information, and in particular it was part of a wireless hotspot and transit spaces study. We were floored by how much truck drivers are on the cutting edge of communication technologies and strategies to stay connected wherever they are. We heard over and over that 'when you live your life on the road, connecting with the people you love is essential to maintaining relationships.' Traditional stereotypes of truck drivers were blown away as we explored the detailed ecosystems these folks built to stay connected! These were not technology people - but they are driven to use technology in innovative and advanced ways to meet a critical need they have. Ethnography helps uncover these unexpected but invaluable uses of technology.

Q: In the mobile industry, how does ethnography help capture lifestyle needs and behaviors? How is researching mobile usage different from desktop behavior?
There are many types of research that are done at Microsoft. One of the early forms of research to be introduced within product development was usability, which usually involves setting up a lab where people talk through their experience as they run through a set of predetermined tasks on a machine set up by the person running the study. This is arguably far more useful in the desktop world, where it is similar to a person's real life experience using a PC: sitting at a desk with a PC in front of them.

However, this is not true with mobile devices. Since the very nature of a mobile device implies that you are 'mobile,' it's counter-intuitive to set up a stationary lab study to understand if the mobile phone experience is optimal. Therefore field studies are particularly well suited to study mobile devices and mobile behavior, because you're right there with people as they move through their mobile device experiences. In fact it was the mobile devices team that hired the first full-time anthropologist.

Q: Do you have any advice for a company or individual interested in pursuing ethnography and/or anthropology?
Absolutely. First piece of advice: if you're interested in deeply understanding your customers' lives, behaviors and needs, then ethnography is a primary tool you should be utilizing to drive your strategy!

Second piece of advice: doing the research is only a quarter of the work. Your research plan should encompass deliverables and communication strategies to make sure that the understandings are internalized and made part of the development process. This is one reason I think having a full-time ethnographer or anthropologist is more impactful than having a consultant do the project. A full-time person becomes the advocate for the customer and works every day to infuse that perspective into the process. With a consultant, they deliver their report and often the work dies once they leave.

Finally: encourage EVERYONE to get out and meet customers. I love bringing team members out into the field. Nothing gives them the 'religion' of the people they're building products for like spending time with them in the field. It will change everything!