Mobile ethnography

Step-by-step guide

1. ‍Specify research question Define your research question or the focus of what you are interested in. Consider why you are doing research (exploratory vs. confirmatory research), what you want to do with your findings, and what sample size you’ll probably need. 
2. Plan and prepare Based on your research question and aim, use sampling techniques to select your research participants and consider including internal experts or external agencies for participant recruitment. Plan to offer incentives for your participants (remember, it is work for them!) and consider how you will communicate the project: what expectations do you want to set and what is the leading task you’ll give them? Recruiting participants is often the hardest part of mobile ethnographic research. Check if there are any legal restrictions for taking photos or videos and if you need to set up a consent and/or confidentiality agreement for your participants. Also, consider who you want to include as researchers from the client side or from other departments involved in the project. 
3. Set up project and invite participants Choose suitable software for your mobile ethnography project and set up your project. Pay attention to the task you give to your participants: keep it short and clear. Define questions for your participant profile so that you can cluster them into groups matching your target groups or personas. Create an invitation in which you explain the project’s aim and their task. Give them clear instructions on how to join the project, how to document their experiences, and the incentive they will get. It helps if you add a gamification component to this and give out different incentives depending on how useful their collected data is. Also, if possible, arrange interviews with participants before the study to clarify the process and to learn about their backgrounds and expectations regarding your research topic. Start with a small pilot project to double-check if your instructions are clear and the collected data is actually useful for your research aim.
4. Data collection Once you have invited participants and started your data collection, you can see your data arriving in real time. You can start to synthesize and analyze your data right away, codifying it by tagging documented experiences or exporting journey maps as input for your research wall or workshops. Optionally, you can decide to use a guided research approach: guided research refers to sending push notifications to your participants either at defined times, such as after an event or every morning as a reminder, or whenever you would like specific participants to elaborate on interesting or unclear data. Set a clear deadline for your participants so that there is an understanding of the time frame and they know when you’ll stop collecting data.
5. Follow-up Go through the collected data and try to find patterns across the reported journey maps (both positive and negative). If possible, conduct debrief interviews with participants to probe further on key issues that arise. Use sorting and filtering options to search for different issues for different groups based on their participant profiles. Once you are done with your individual analysis, write up your key learnings and compare them within your team. Review all your data and index it; highlight important passages. Try to find patterns among your data and between all researchers. Write a short summary that includes your key findings as well as raw data to exemplify these, such as quotes, photos, or videos. Alternatively, create a conflated journey map for each participant group you discovered.

Method notes

• ‍Like all research methods, mobile ethnography has some disadvantages, such as the method’s strong dependency on the participants’ motivations, and the lack of cues like body language and tone of voice. Also, mobile ethnography does not work for experiences with a very short time span: the minimum duration is approximately 2–4 hours. With shorter experiences, the usage of a mobile phone affects the individual participant’s experiences too much and you’ll see a strong bias in your data.
• One way to tackle potential biases is through method triangulation. Mobile ethnography works particularly well in combination with indepth interviews in which researchers debrief participants. In such debrief sessions, they go through the participant’s data together to reflect and decode what they meant and why they chose what they documented. This also allows researchers to dig deeper with regard to key issues.