Extending Nokia’s legacy of Exploratory User Research

“We have deliberately sought to devise and place ourselves within a ‘context of discovery’ rather than a ‘context of proof’”

Gouldner & Peterson 1962

In recent years, the concept of an exploratory approach focusing on discovery to inspire and inform design and innovation (Chipchase, numerous 2005-2008) has often been conflated with the term discovery-driven innovation in the popular press, but as the literature on the latter (McGrath & MacMillan, 1995; McGrath, 2010) shows, the approach recommended for discovery is based on learning from experimentation and iteration (McGrath and McManus, 2020) – often called the ‘spaghetti on the wall’ approach by practitioners and faculty in methods based innovation planning and design* as there are no bounds to the solution space prior to beginning iterative prototype development and experimentation.

I find myself writing this blog article because there is no literature introducing the theoretical background and thus, the methodology, for the type of discovery research that companies like Nokia used to conduct (Blom, Chipchase, & Lehikoinen, 2005) to inspire and inform the design of novel products and services. I first came across the term exploratory user research, as opposed to the more common user research, in Jan Chipchase’s blog during his heyday (eg. Chipchase, 2007), and could find no citations or literature to reference it for my first exploratory grant funded study in 2008-2009. I resorted to using a link extracted in 2009 to then Nokia Design Researcher Younghee Jung’s blog (Jung, 2008, defunct).

For the design research team in Nokia (Chipchase & Steinhardt, 2013; Jung, 2008) exploratory user research meant conducting primary fieldwork in new and unknown markets – often those opening up to mobile telephony – where they traveled around documenting observations, conducting camera studies, interviewing people, spending a ‘day in the life’ etc, all of which are derived from ethnography, though some are mentioned by Swedberg (2020).

As Ichikawa, Chipchase & Grignani, (2005) describe in their Method section in detail, they had to figure out ways to identify the users to be interviewed through what has come to be known as ‘guerrilla interviews’ within practice in real time on the streets of New York, Helsinki, and Milan. They cite an approach (Tamminen, Oulasvirta, Toiskallio,  & Kankainen, 2004) to their study rather than cite any literature on exploratory user research for their methodology, instead choosing to explicate the various methods used for discovery. Tamminen and colleagues describe their approach as follows:

The data was gathered by ethnographic participant observation and analysed from an ethnomethodological standpoint [13, 14]. Ethnomethodology is interested in how people make sense of their social world, on how everyday life gets ‘‘done’’ with the help of different trivial actions and resources that are available to people in a given situation.

Tamminen et al (2004)

Their citations for the ethnomethodological standpoint are Garfinkel (1967) and Wolcott (1995). This approach is also from sociology, as are Swedberg’s (2020) examples of exploratory studies, but its limited by its nature as a fundamentally descriptive discipline which does not engage in the explanation or evaluation of the particular social order undertaken as a topic of study.

That is, while useful for those looking to inspire the design of mobile phones in the early days, it is by itself insufficient for generating hypotheses for contexts where data collection might always be inadequate or insufficient, and where there is little prior knowledge of the subject matter. Swedberg (2020) offers a glimpse of the legacy of an exploratory approach to research from sociology. The reasons he gives for using such an approach based on his own analysis, are:

• The empirical situation makes it necessary to use an exploratory approach. Swedberg (2020) gives the example of a study conducted in 1937 by Lazarsfeld & Stouffer on the effects of the Great Depression on families, where they state it was difficult for them to get good data because by the time of their study, the most dramatic downturn of the business cycle was already over, thus necessitating an exploratory study.
• When existing facts are contradictory or fragmentary in nature. The example used by Swedburg (2020) is James Coleman’s study (1958) of nationalism in Nigeria.
• A general lack of knowledge about some topic that was important to study. (Swedberg, 2020)
• And for generating new hypothesis, even if the social phenomenon had already been studied quite a bit. Paraphrasing Swedberg (2020) who quotes Merton extensively to support this reason, in hypothesis-generating exploratory studies, the language used signals to the reader that the hypothesis are tentative; and, that the researcher was justified in moving ahead, albeit with less than stellar facts. And, that even if new hypotheses were generated, they could not be verified within the scope of the initial explorations.

It is on the point of methodology, or rather the methods used, that exploratory user research for discovery and to inform and inspire design and innovation diverges from Swedberg’s methodological arguments (Swedberg, 2020) which are based on contemporary thinking within the discipline of sociology. After all, the goals for the disciplines are quite different even if the methods used are often the same. Worth noting, is the fact that sociology is one of the preferred first degrees for graduate study in human centered design research methods and in such design firms (Bhan, 2004).

On the other hand, the ethnomethodological approach still serves the purpose of exploratory user research conducted to provide insights for design and innovation based on Swedberg’s (2020) own summarization:

An exploratory study can essentially be carried out for two different purposes. The first is to increase the knowledge of a topic that is little known but needs to be better known. The second is to generate new and interesting hypotheses about a topic that is already known.

Swedburg, 2020

In my own experience of conducting exploratory user research to inform design and innovation, I began with the first purpose in mind, but over the years of focusing on the same context and conditions, I have progressed to projects designed for the latter purpose. I would say that my hypotheses have been generated in the space between projects rather than as their direct outcome. My approach can best be described by Stebbins (2001) guiding precept:

To understand well any phenomenon, it is necessary to start by looking at it in broad, nonspecialized terms. In other words, first observe the woods, then study its individual trees.

Stebbins, 2001

And, his following sentences serve to explain my own rationale for starting out on this path of figuring out how to use elements of the design process, such as exploratory user research, to figure out a way to understand what seemed to me to be inherent conflicts between problem framing and solution development for low income populations.

The modern tendency to rely on formulas inverts this precept, causing no small number of people to get lost in the forest while also contributing to the intractable problems of incomplete explanation of and faulty prediction about social life.

Stebbins, 2001

Whilst recent news implies that remote user research across socio-economic and continental barriers is possible, how much of this can scale, as an approach, for those without the legacy of local field experience who are able to contextualize fresh insights against their own experiential knowledge base?

The role of exploratory user research to inform a holistic approach to innovation that goes beyond artefacts and takes local social and economic systems into consideration is one we will continue exploring at Ymmärrys ry. Our first three year plan targets such exploratory user research with rural communities.

(* speaking as former Director of Graduate Admissions at the Institute of Design, Illinois Institute of Technology 2002-2005)