Happy New Year!

We are pleased to announce that Keren Solomon, ethnographer and speaker extraordinaire, will be presenting at our January 17th meeting of the BayCHI Usability Engineering BOF / Bay Area UPA Chapter. Snacks and chatting will begin at 7:00pm and our speaker will start at 7:30pm.  Our location will be at Intuit - 2550 Garcia Ave , Building 5, Mountain View. (See below for more information about the presentation, and a URL for directions to the meeting.)

We look forward to seeing you!

Kaaren Hanson, Emily Hebard, & Mary Van Riper


Topic: Ethnography as a tool to understand our customers

As researchers, we observe and ask questions in multiple places - focus group facilities, usability labs, stores and streets.  Every type of research that we do helps us answer different questions about our products and their users.  Ethnography is an excellent tool for discovering what people do in context, rather than what they say they do, think they do, or how they follow tasks.  

In this presentation, Keren will describe some basic shopping behaviors and how they impact the design of retail environments and products.  She will discuss some ethnographic techniques and the type of information that can be captured using ethnography.  Her goal is to show ethnography as a tool for researchers, to illustrate a few key research principles, and to talk about the tools of the retail ethnography trade.  

About Keren Solomon
Keren Solomon has ten years experience providing customer insight and marketing solutions for Fortune 500 companies, e-commerce companies, and entrepreneurs.  Her areas of expertise include ethnography, qualitative research, and user experience research.  Keren has worked with US and international companies in multiple industries, including consumer products, retail, technology, entertainment, travel, and financial services.  She is currently a consultant in the Bay Area.  Before moving here (from New York), Keren was a project director at Envirosell, a behavioral research company that specializes in observing and analyzing people's behavior in retail environments.  Keren is an avid traveler and a published photographer.

For directions, see http://www.baychi.org/calendar/20060117/

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