I suppose my worry is that the emphasis on data-mining makes it appear that an online community can be automatised; my experience so far has been that the best communities are an enjoyable, high quality experience that has to be created and actively nurtured by those running the community.

Usability research is a great example of the power of undestanding what goes on when someone interacts with a site – talking throught the response gives you an immediate, rapid insight that would not be obvious from looking at the analytics.

Satisfaction is a great example of why it’s important to go and measure something with a purposive sample as opposed to simply relying on ‘found’ feedback…it’s frequently not at all obvious how happy people are with a product or service. You ask, you stand a rather higher chance of finding out.

I suppose the counter to this view is that if you have comment and you have sales (behaviour) then the part in the middle isn’t necessary any more.

I’m a student at Oglethorpe University in Atlanta, Georgia. I’m currently working on an honors thesis about generation y and their motivations. I hope that I’m not being too forward, but I read some of your articles on generation y in the workplace and I was wondering if I could ask you a few questions. I’m writing you for two reasons, not only because I simply wanted some input on which direction to take my thesis, but also because it is part of an assignment for my thesis writing class here at school. So, I apologize for the rashness, but since there is a relative time sensitivity to this message, I will just ask my questions now. They are basically these: How do you think career choices reflect the mindset of a gen y’er?And also, if you were in my shoes and trying to discover the motivations of gen y’ers, where would you start?

I would like to also thank you for the writing that you have done on this subject. It has been very insightful and helpful to me through this process and quite frankly, I think if I hadn’t stumbled on to it, I’d be completely lost right now.

Thank you.
Erica Taylor
Oglethorpe University Class of 2011

Two additional (related) comments:

I believe that when new approaches begin/are created, “technique ideologues” pave the way. They’ll suggest that “X is all that’s needed.” Over time, as more and more researchers adopt the value of the approach, we include some of those techniques with more traditional approaches. Shop-alongs aren’t really “pure ethnography;” we borrowed from anthropology and hybridized it.

Which leads to my second thought: we hybridize everything because we need to ask questions. I’ve been doing usability testing for nearly 15 years. Never once in all that time have I done what I know is a pure usability study; in every case, at some point, I’ve needed to probe for clarification and guidance.

I’m intrigued by social networks and what I refer to as discourse analysis. But like you all, I can’t imagine it being the end-all, be-all.

A few years ago, I did a load of research among consumers about their water supply. Those groups where you start off asking them what they think and they all look blank because they just take it for granted. Got the discussion started though and I couldn’t shut them up.