Editor’s note: Kari McGlynn is qualitative project director at Socratic Technologies Inc., a San Francisco research firm.

In the ongoing quest to deliver desirable new products quickly, manufacturers are increasingly focusing on ways to rapidly examine opportunities within the early stages of the design process.

The “fuzzy front end,” a term coined by product development expert Don Reinertsen, refers to the conceptual or planning stages of product design, where emerging market opportunities and user needs are first discovered and established.

Ethnography has emerged as an important tool utilized throughout the product development cycle. Observing a consumer’s actual behavior within a particular role or context provides designers with a grounded set of conditions upon which to base their ideas. Watching end users interact with a product in its real-life context can offer invaluable insights for how to further refine that product’s design.

Traditional ethnographic research methods, however, pose their own logistical challenges. Depending on the scope of a product’s reach within the marketplace, observing an adequate cross section of end users can require significant travel. One of the biggest complaints from research clients regarding ethnography is that the process is too costly and time-consuming.

Still, as product lifecycles shorten and the need to consistently reevaluate and revise product design increases, user-centered research utilizing ethnography is becoming more and more important. To embrace the rapid pace of a user-driven product development lifecycle, manufacturers need rapid, user-centered feedback channels for informing the entire process.

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