Cultural Ethnography: A Brief Report

Cultural Ethnography: A Brief Report:
A user in the usability lab is like a tiger in the cage, helpless!
Study him in his natural habitat!

this is a short report from an hci practitioner who has moved into the realm of ethnography. i think it captures one of the main failures of much of hci lab centricity, though… it could be states more broadly as. behavior in lab environments is not normal behavior, that includes the mental process and mode of preparedness of the individual, thus lab based hci does not map onto everyday use of computers in homes, businesses, etc. except in the most general senses of interaction’