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Netnography,Approach,for,UX,Research
Idyawati Hussein
MIMOS Berhad
Bukit Jalil, Kuala Lumpur,
Malaysia
idyawati.hussein@mimos.my
Murni Mahmud
International Islamic University
Malaysia
Gombak, Malaysia
murni@iium.edu.my
Nor Laila Md Noor
Universiti Teknologi MARA
Shah Alam, Malaysia
norlaila@tmsk.uitm.edu.my
ABSTRACT,
This paper discusses on how netnography can be applied
to gain an understanding on sensitive research topic in a
high power distance culture. The study investigated the
frustrations among practitioners in incorporating the User
Experience Design (UXD) in software development
process. Netnography has been applied to uncover the
unspoken behaviors of stakeholders and attitudes of
clients who disrespect designers that reflects the UX
practitioners frustration on the stakeholiders‘ politics.
This findings will be useful in seeking a solution to
improve the UXD process. From this work it can be
concluded that netnography can be a suitable approach to
gain deeper insights into understanding practitioner’s
frustrations in UX research study.
Author,Keywords,
User Experience (UX), frustration, design, community of
practice, Malaysia
ACM,Classification,Keywords,
Participatory Design, Empirical Qualitative, User
Experience Design, Office and Workplace
INTRODUCTION,
Most research work on users’ frustration were centered on
the user studies based on the principles in the user-
centered design (UCD) and later extended to the context
of user experience design (UXD). When research work on
UXD studies extends into the realm of the software
development studies, it was discovered that the gap
between developers and users in practice persists [12].
This may be due to the developer’s mindset which is in a
conundrum that users always do not know what they want
[3]. Perhaps more studies on UXD practices are needed
based on practitioners. In particular, where HCI
awareness is still low and UXD practices is still at its
infancy state like in Malaysia.
Questions about what happened, issues that matter most in
the practice, and their relationship to software production
development and design were not address. The literature
on UXD practices revealed the lack of understanding on
the context of the stakeholder’s role within the UXD
process in practice. Therefore, it is reasonable to ask
about how practitioners include stakeholders in the project
development process.
RELATED,LITERATURE,
The term ‘stakeholder’ was first coined by students of
business administration and corporate management in the
1980s to refer to individuals, groups or other
organisations who have interest and ability to influence an
organization [10]. On the other hand, in software
development studies, stakeholder refers to the “user” who
had little interest in the system but need to attain some
goals; directly or indirectly [4].
The literature of user-centered and participatory design
has identified the phenomenon of power between the
stakeholders [16] which later became known as
stakeholder politics. This phenomenon inflicted a power
structure that may affect the final decision making on the
design [6].
[6] further concluded that fitting the UXD process into
development phases was difficult, for reasons such as the
lack of time, communication problems, organisational
problems, bad attitudes, lacking in competence or merely
focusing the attention on the project to keep within time
and budget. According to [6], bad attitudes refer to the
software developers who lacked respect to the users.
Previous research findings on UXD practices were limited
to the discovery of the usability methods, tools and
techniques that were most used by usability practitioners
in industry [13] and lacks on the reason for not
implementing UUXD within development teams. Another
concern on the research of UCD/UXD practices was the
focus on what should be done, rather than what actually
happens in practice.
In addition, despite the numerous emphasis on the
importance of UXD constraints, there is little variety
methodological approach used for studying the UXD
practice. Previous methodological approach to the study
of practice is dominated by quantitative survey method.
Lately qualitative approaches were adopted as seen in [2]
who employed the interview method on designers.
It is found that qualitative methods enabled the
researchers to uncover constraints which allow them to
focus on effective UCD practice. In terms of the research
method for understanding the practice; [17] reported that
the most effective method is observation. However, the
medium or context for observation may differ.
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DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2898459.2898477
!
Among the new methods of observation in the community
of practice is netnography. It is a form of ethnography
conducted on the Internet that adapts the traditional and
in-person ethnographic research techniques of
anthropology to the study of online cultures and
communities formed through computer-mediated
communications [14].
Netnography provides a spectrum of participation by
observing, reading, posting and commenting the social
network platform to gain insight into the attitudes,
behaviours and actions of members in the social network
[14].
On top of that, most studies were conducted in the
developed countries and may not represent the situation of
the UXD practices in the developing countries. In
addition, an opportunity to understand UXD properties
using netnography is wide open. The next section will
describe detail information about our research methods.
METHODS,
In our work we opted for the application of netnography
as our qualitative approach towards understanding the
UXD practices in the Malaysian context. Malaysia is said
to be a country with a high power distance [1][20].
Power distance is defined as the extent to which the less
powerful members of institutions and organisations within
a country expect and accept that power is distributed
unequally [11]. Unjustly, it is expected that Malaysians in
general are willing to accept the fact of inequality in
power as being normal [20]. The following sub-sections
described the details of the procedure involved.
Planning,and,entrée,
At this stage, the researcher participated in the online
community through a social media channel set up by a
local UX leader. The chosen social media in this study
was Facebook, with its mounting number of members and
activities posted in the closed group.
Participants,
Seven (7) practitioners participated in the discussions on
UXD practitioners frustrations. The participants were
between the ages of 25 to 35. There were six (6) male and
one (1) female engaged in the conversations. Labels were
given to the participants who commented to the open
ended question on the group’s wall.
The open question was posted on the social group UX
Malaysia: “What are the three main frustrations in being a
User Experience practitioner?” The orthogonal situation
of frustration was chosen over satisfaction to identify the
sources of problem on conducting UXD process.
Analysis,and,interpretation.,
This process was conducted using open coding, as
described in the grounded theory approach by [19]. Each
response was individually analysed and sentences were
coded according to affective codes, which include
emotion coding and values coding. Then, the codes for
each sentence were interpreted and assigned to categories.
This process resulted in a list of categories and codes,
which were used to get an overview of similar problems
faced by members of the group.
RESULTS,
The data was analysed through manual coding using paper
and pencil on hardcopies. Manual coding was possible
due to the small scale of the observation from social
media, with not more than 10 responses to the question.
Six (6) themes were created based on the categories
labelled for each excerpt: unclear goals and purposes,
difficult clients, client network influence, lack of
knowledge, confusion between UX and GUI, and
financial resources.
Table 1. Causes practitioners’ frustration
Table 1 summarises the cause of frustration on becoming
UXD practitioners. Each comment and sentence was read
through line by line and analysed individually [15]. 15
codes were identified in the open coding analysis and 9
categories could be labelled for each sentence.
Affective code, which included emotional labels, was
chosen as guidance [7]. The expressions of emotion led to
the values, attitudes and beliefs of participants; these were
structured, coded and summarised, then explained and
interpreted [15].
Unclear,Goals,and,Purposes,
The largest number of comments by participants reflected
that most of them believed that most frustrations came
from a lack of direction and clarity of the requirements on
Codes
Categories
Theme
“Lack of direction”
“Lack of ownership”
“Forgot business needs and
requirements”
Goal
Purpose
Business goal
(Codes=3)
Unclear
goals and
purpose
“Being a scape goat”
“Nonsense”
“Clients? Bad ones”
“My 12-year-old daughter
can do so much better”
“Difficult client”
“I blame you”
“You end up becoming a
photocopy machine”
Blame
Anger
Judgmental
(Codes=7)
Client
attitude
“They know what they don’t
want”
“If they go about colour tone
of the logo, size of the button,
and keep changing for the
next two to three meetings,
it’s a sign that they have no
idea what they want”
“Some clients have an
unlimited amount of cash to
blow but don’t care about all
these (referring to UX).”
Not knowing
(Codes=3)
Lack of UX
awareness
“Clearly misunderstood web
design and user experience”
Understanding
(Codes=1)
Confusion
between
UX and
GUI
“Some clients are really
excited about having great
UI/UX design for their
products but can’t afford my
rates”
Resources
(Codes=1)
Financial
constraint
the part of the business served by both clients and UX
practitioners.
Lack of direction, lack of ownership and being a
scapegoat are issues that I face as a professional. Clients
became upset and behaved unprofessionally towards UX
practitioners if they were not satisfied with the end
products or results (FBP5, 11).
Difficult,Clients,
From the practitioners’ point of view, the most difficult
challenge was in dealing with “bad” client. A participant
gave an example of how clients behaved during the
requirement elicitation stage:
Clients? I had real bad ones a long time ago. Example 1:
Change the “Next” to “Proceed” button then change to
“Agree”, then during the next meeting, change “Agree”
to “OK”. Example 2: “I like it blue”; next meeting: “No,
better purple”; next meeting: “Change to this navy blue”.
Example 3: “Too wide, too narrow, too wide”.
All referring to the same screen. Example 4: “If other
people can do it so nicely, why can’t you?”, “I don’t have
resources”, “Don’t give me that nonsense, I provided you
enough! Google them!”. Example 5: “My 12-year-old
daughter can do so much better.” (FBP1, 1).
This excerpt shows how “bad” clients communicated
during the development process, frustrating the
practitioners because they kept changing the design
requirements. It implied a lack of clear goals on the
client’s side. No matter how good the product UX is,
some “bad” clients will still blame the practitioners:
There are clients who can be really difficult and no matter
what you do, they’ll still blame you (FBP4, 10).
In this example, the clients seemed to be influential
people that made decisions on the systems or products. It
was observed that the client’s decision was more
important than the end users’. (Clients might be the
stakeholders of a company, an organisation or a project.)
Client,Network,Influence,
Some clients wanted a website that looked exactly like
their competitor’s or their families’. In this case, these
clients had a strong influence on the final product under
development. However, they seemed to be unclear of the
exact goals of the website, which is why they wanted to
follow the existing products of related people, in
particular, close acquaintances or cronies. In the
Webster’s Dictionary, the term crony is often perceived as
derogatory and refers to a close friend or companion with
whom they have a long history.
They [clients] just want something that looks exactly like
the ones [of] their competitor, parent company or sister
company. Otherwise, they shove some super boring and
restrictive brand guidelines so you pretty much end up
becoming a photocopy machine (FBP6, 16).
In this example, the UX practitioner or “copier machine”
had little opportunity for inputs on the design decision.
It helps when you can convince a client that the purpose
of the product is not to satisfy the boss, the boss’s wife,
mistress or daughter. The purpose of the product is to
serve their customers/demographic and that’s the aim. So
if their customers test the product and they like it, it’s a
success even if the Datuk, Director or COO thinks the
button looks too small on their phone (FBP6, 16).
The results showed that users are often represented by
clients. In line with previous studies in the information
systems field, system stakeholders might be selected on
the basis of political affiliation and compliance rather than
for their understanding of the exact system requirements
[6].
Lack,of,Knowledge,
Sometimes, clients did not understand the terminology or
the results they wanted out of a system or product. Most
comments referred to the behaviour of clients as a result
of their limited knowledge or awareness of the importance
of UX. Some clients did not know what they wanted,
although they knew what they didn’t want.
This is reflected in the goal theory of approach motivation
and avoidance motivation [18], in which humans divide
their goals into the things they want to achieve and the
things they want to avoid. The following excerpt
illustrates this:
You do sometimes bump into clients who know what
they’re saying and clearly know what they want. I usually
only pull this stunt when I suspect that clients have no
idea what they want. When a client asks questions about
the flow and how information is being displayed, they
know what they are talking about, where the design has to
be tweaked to demonstrate their idea. If they go about
colour tone of the logo, size of the button, and keep
changing for the next two to three meetings, it’s a sign
that they have no idea what they want (FBP3, 12).
This scenario created frustration among practitioners:
Don’t you just hate people who know what they don’t
want but don’t know what they do want? (FBP4, 13).
Some practitioners knew how to assess clients based on
their knowledge of what they wanted, and the findings
indicate one approach to the identification of clients who
know what they want out of a project: observation of the
client’s response to the initial prototyping. They either
express concern about the information flow, which
indicates their level of knowledge of their proposal, or
they point to visually-displayed media.
Confusion,Between,UX,and,GUI,
Usually, I don’t let clients interfere with our work to the
point where they decide what colour the button should be
or how the specific flow of an app should be. All that will
be discussed and agreed upon during the planning stages.
If they hire us to do the work, then I’ll make sure we do
the work (FBP6, 16).
!
Some practitioners refrain from letting the clients’
become involved in the subjective design features as it is
difficult to measure and comply with them. Too often,
clients request changes in terms of colour, appearance and
other aesthetic elements, and practitioners would rather
“sign off” on the design first to avoid such changes that
may put their projects’ schedule asterisk.
Financial,Resources,
Finance was found to be among the reasons for
practitioners’ frustration, not because there were
insufficient resources but because clients lacked
consideration of UX. In the analysis, both limited and
unlimited financial resources were the reasons
practitioners felt disappointed. Limited financial resources
were expected to be a problem, but unlimited financial
resources were even more irritating because the clients
were concerned with trivia rather than the overall UX;
Some clients have an unlimited amount of cash to blow
but don’t care about all these (referring to UX). Some
clients are really excited about having great UI/UX
design for their products but can’t afford my rates (FBP6,
16).
Based on the descriptions, comments, use of language and
expression by the members of the group, it was found that
there was general interest by people in the same domain,
that is usability and user experience. The problems posed
by the netnography participants were in line with the
problems faced by practitioners who tried to introduce
UCD in development processes [2][8][21].
CONCLUSIONS,
The findings of this study revealed the situation in the
design work and the suffering that have arisen from the
shortcomings due to stakeholders’ politics. Prior studies
have noted the importance of corporate politics, culture
and procedures in influencing the incorporation of
usability in a project [5].
However, in this study, netnography linked clients’
attitude to a lacking of respect or trust towards designers.
This result has lack been decribed in any previous studies.
[9] mentioned the word lacked respect for usability issues
but did not explained in details.
Some of the issues emerging from these findings are
related to a design decision-making power in a project or
team. UXD practitioners would be more likely to
influence management and clients regarding UXD if they
had the authority to make design decisions. Further work
is required to confirm this.
However, despite success in discovering an in depth
insights of practitioner’s frustrations, this study is subject
to a number of limitations, mainly associated with the
number of responses in this particular problems.
Unexpectedly, the informers expressed their opinions
freely without covering their real identities to contribute
to the in-depth insights of their experiences.
It was found that these practitioners where working in
private sectors, where opinions were appreciated as
individual preferences. However as for the participants
from the government sector, no one commented on the
issues as seen from the profile used to comment on this
issue.
This may be due to the culture of a high power distance
country whereby employees are ‘afraid’ of their
employers as employers wield powers such as the
authority to fire employees [20]. The practitioners may
refrained from having issues with their employers if they
exposed the issues which might give a bad impressions to
the company they are working with.
In conclusion, this work showed that netnography was
able to uncover the causes of frustrations in the attitude of
clients and to reveal the knowledge, skills, motivation,
awareness, resources, culture and procedures of a
company.
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