Bonnie A. Nardi 1
Bonnie A. Nardi
AT&T Labs-West nardi@research.att.com
www.nardi/best.com/default.html
October, 2000

• Lots of ways:
– surveys
– focus groups
– logging phone, internet use
– lab-based experiments
• Useful for many purposes, but don’t impart a sense of users’ everyday experience and context
• Ecological design
– users in their native habitats
– what problems and opportunities might we find out about?
Bonnie A. Nardi 2 October, 2000

• Discussion of ecological design, esp. ethnographic methods
• Specific application of ecological design:
– the netWORK study
– the ContactMap prototype
Bonnie A. Nardi 3 October, 2000

Local: Consider as a single analytical unit, local systems of: people practices technologies values
· e.g., lifelong learning, efficiency, profit, patient care, customer care, privacy, open access to information,.....
· local “ecosystems,” e.g., offices, homes, schools, hospitals...
Global: Consider, as a backdrop, larger socioeconomic context in which people work and play
· trends in global economy and society as they impinge on our customers
Bonnie A. Nardi 4 October, 2000

Bonnie A. Nardi 5 October, 2000

1a. Ethnographic studies of user activity
· rich, nuanced, subtle descriptions of activity in local settings
1b. Clues about larger socioeconomic context
2. Analyze data to identify gaps and problems in practice
3. Dream up ideas for technologies/services to meet real human needs
4. Prototype technologies
· diverse ecology of designers
 computer scientists, social scientists, artists...
5. Get very early feedback on prototypes
6. Iterate design
Bonnie A. Nardi 6 October, 2000

• Most closely associated with anthropology, but also sociology
• Ethnography is an approach for developing understandings of the everyday activities of people in local settings
• Ethnography’s Project: enable conversations across social and cultural boundaries between people quite different from one another
– Us trying to understand our customers
Bonnie A. Nardi 7 October, 2000

• Holism
– focus on relations among activities and not on single tasks or single isolated individuals
– everything connected to everything else
• Natives’ point(s) of view
– how people see their own worlds
– opportunity to engage with customers
• Study people in their native habitats
– e.g., home, office, school, library, hospital, community...
Bonnie A. Nardi 8 October, 2000

• In-depth interviews in context
• Observation
• Participant-observation
Intensive interactions
Bonnie A. Nardi 9 October, 2000

• Feed results back to developers as work progresses
• Become part of the cycle of iteration
• Get 4-6 weeks up front to do some initial in-depth work
Bonnie A. Nardi 10 October, 2000

• Deeper, more nuanced understandings
• More ecological validity
– Represent what’s really going on in some everyday setting
– What’s meaningful to people
• (disconnect between e.g., survey questions... and how people think about things)
• Respect for complexity of human activity
• Design for human needs; reflect users’ own issues and everyday problems
• Cheaper to do it right the first time
– considering the cost of launching a new product
Bonnie A. Nardi 11 October, 2000

• Seeing the world in a single grain of sand
– comparative work needed
– build from multiple cases
• Ethnography in a mobile, distributed world
– it’s easier when the natives sit still, but we have to modify our methods and perspectives...
Bonnie A. Nardi 12 October, 2000

• Work undertaken jointly with
– Steve Whittaker - AT&T Labs-Research - Florham Park,
NJ
– Ellen Isaacs - AT&T Labs-Research - Menlo Park, CA
– Rebecca Nagel, AT&T Labs, Menlo Park, CA
– Heinrich Schwarz - Science, Society and Technology, MIT
– Erin Bradner - University of California, Irvine
– John Hainsworth, Princeton University
– Mike Creech, Jeff Johnson (independent consultants)
• Perspectives: psychology, anthropology, computer science, art
Bonnie A. Nardi 13 October, 2000

• Beyond teams
– Customer-vendor relationships
– Partnering, alliances across companies
– Facilitators between and within organizations
– High level managers
– Experts, e.g., patent attorneys, reference librarians, HR
– Contractors, consultants
Bonnie A. Nardi 14 October, 2000

• Lengthy open-ended audiotaped interviews
– 1000 pages transcript
• Questions:
– What do you do?
– Who do you do it with?
– What technologies do you use?
• Observations
Bonnie A. Nardi 15 October, 2000

• Public relations
• Law
• Management
• Creative media (Web design, commercials)
• High tech
• Telecommunications
Technically savvy, use lots of technology, work across organizational boundaries
Bonnie A. Nardi 16 October, 2000

• Constant change in organizations
– downsizing, merging, partnering, reorging, outsourcing….
• People’s personal social networks important under conditions of organizational change, instability due to changing nature of global economy
– anchors in people’s worklives, careers
• netWORK
– create, maintain, activate personal social networks
• Networking isn’t new (Webster’s 1940) but intensified in today’s economy
Bonnie A. Nardi 17 October, 2000

• netWORK needed to be effective:
– to yourself for career
– to your organization for information gathering and labor recruitment
Bonnie A. Nardi 18 October, 2000

Bonnie A. Nardi 19
Funding
Agencies
Venture
Capital
Colleagues in Other
Organizations
October, 2000

• NetWORK a kind of invisible, unaccounted-for work
– not in performance evaluations, workflow diagrams, timesheets, social science theories...
• But users have to devote time and energy to it
• netWORK activities
– create personal social network
– maintain personal social network
– activate personal social network
– control own presence in personal social network
• e.g., am I available, and if so, to whom?
Bonnie A. Nardi 20 October, 2000

• A Networker’s Work is Never Done: Joint Work in
Intensional Networks. B. Nardi, S. Whittaker, H. Schwarz.
Forthcoming in CSCW.
• Nardi, B., Whittaker, Steve, Schwarz, Heinrich.. It's Not
What You Know, It's Who You Know: Work in the
Information Age. First Monday, May, 2000 (firstmonday.org)
• Know Who You Know, ComputerWorld, September 4, 2000.
– article by Mat Schwartz on ContactMap
Bonnie A. Nardi 21 October, 2000

• Remembering who’s in the social network
– who they are
– their details
– current whereabouts and activities
• Using multiple communication media easily
• Remembering which documents have been exchanged when
• Remembering task status
• Getting awareness information for non-colocated contacts
– could be next floor or building, or next continent
Bonnie A. Nardi 22 October, 2000

• Redesign the desktop to reflect people in user’s social network rather than lists, hierarchies, folders
• Visualize the user’s personal social network
– individuals, groups
• Provide unifying interface for communication and information
Bonnie A. Nardi 23 October, 2000

Bonnie A. Nardi 24 October, 2000

Bonnie A. Nardi 25 October, 2000

• Initiate communications
– click to dial
– email
– instant messaging
– video
– fax....
• Find documents associated with a contact (to and from)
– email, graphics files, text files, web pages...
• See reminders
• See availability of others (“activity meters”)
• Initially populate ContactMap through analysis of contacts in email folders (maybe later phone logs)
Bonnie A. Nardi 26 October, 2000

• Most desktop redesigns don’t consider communication as a central fact of digital life
– document-centric
• Lifestreams (product from Yale research)
• Presto (Xerox PARC)
– but cell phones, pagers, pdas, electronic books, computers are all merging (above only for computers)
– ContactMap intended to integrate (somehow) with other device interfaces
• Our Step 1 research gave us the idea for a nexus where we can meaningfully bring together information and communication, i.e., personal social networks
Bonnie A. Nardi 27 October, 2000

• Provide easy ways to create user-defined clusters of contacts
– typical clusters are family, friends, project-n, project-n+1, old workplace, old workplace n-1....
Step 6. Iterate..we’re doing this now!
Bonnie A. Nardi 28 October, 2000

Bonnie A. Nardi 29 October, 2000