Your First Mobile Ethnography Project - A Definitive Guide
1. What is Mobile Ethnography?
Mobile ethnography enables research respondents to self-document how they behave, act and feel, in-context, and in-the-moment. Using a Mobile Ethnography App that is installed on the respondent’s smartphone, respondents diarise their behaviors and feelings in-the-moment using videos, photos, or text. These multimedia diary posts are automatically uploaded from their smartphones via WiFi so that researchers can immediately observe these posts using a dashboard on their computer without the need to travel to the location of the respondent.
Digital ethnography utilizes an App installed on the respondent’s smartphone that enables respondents to record their everyday lives in relation to the topic of research being undertaken.
With the convergence of smartphones, video, 4G networks, and social networking / messaging, mobile ethnography (sometimes referred to as ‘Digital Ethnography’) has emerged as an increasingly popular autoethnographic research methodology.
2. Who is Mobile Ethnography for?
Traditional, in-person ethnography tends to be time-consuming and expensive, it is a qualitative research methodology that has historically been perceived as being within the budgets of very few brands and as a result, brands and researchers have tended to “brand” ethnography as expensive and not scalable. That is no longer the case.
Smartphones and mobile technology have now increased capailities and functionality. All of which can be leveraged for qualitative research. The emergence of instant connectivity and now 5G networks significantly reduces the limitations experienced with traditional qualitative research techniques. The extent of global reach has substantially increased. Focus groups are not limited to face to face board room settings.
The costs implied through traditonal methods, such as, focus groups are descreasing with the adoption of mobile applications as a sustainable and cost saving alternative. Mobile Ethnography plays a key role in increasing the effectiveness and cost saving benefits of novel qualitative research methods. Indeemo is a leading platform in this digital space.
A Selection of Clients
3. How Does it Work?
Clients typically commission ethnographers or qualitative researchers to design, and undertake the research using mobile ethnography. However, brands are also engaging with providers like Indeemo directly.
Respondents are sourced by recruiters who source and “screen” respondents based on screeners (essentially questionnaires) designed by the client and researcher in order to quickly screen out respondents who do not fit the desired segmentation/target persona.
Once qualified, respondents are screened and recruited, they are offered a financial incentive and opt-in to take part in the mobile ethnography research project. The period in which respondents take part in the mobile ethnography research is called fieldwork.
[Indeemo Tip: Download Our Introduction to Mobile Ethnography if you want to learn more about this research methodology.]
4. Key Features
So what are some of the key features that are making this approach so popular?
Multiple Languages
Tasks can be programmed in any language with the app available in English, Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Korean, and Romanian.
Mobile Screen Recording
Mobile screen recording gives an invaluable insight into in-the-moment and in-context actions your respondents take on their phones.
Desktop Recording
Our Chrome plugin enables you to do remote UX / usability testing on any desktop website or application.
Automated Video Transcription
Automated Video Transcription automatically transcribes all videos into searchable transcripts in minutes allowing for a quick analysis.
Customer Journey Mapping
Customer journey mapping feature allows you to quantify and map any User Experience or Customer Experience in-context and in-the-moment.
Recruiter Login
The Recruiter login feature is a great time-saving feature through allowing your Recruiter log into Indeemo and add respondents, invite them, see registered users, send reminders on your behalf, and export activity reports to Excel.
Intuitive Respondent App
Our intuitive, fun to use app with social media style UX allows to capture real-life, in-the-moment behaviors from Respondents
Intuitive Insights Dashboard
Our user-friendly research dashboard allows you to instantly view respondent's uploads for observation, probing moderation, and analysis.
Keyword Search & Cloud
Keyword search and word cloud tools allow you to analyze respondents' data and quickly observe trends amongst the sample group.
5. Enterprise Grade Security
GDPR Compliant
HIPAA Verified
Information Security
Enterprise Ready
At Indeemo we continue to invest in security across all of our applications and systems, and to ensure our team is always up to date with the latest compliance training. We support clients ranging from Research Agencies to Freelance Consultants to leading Health Care Providers as well as major consumer brands from around the world.
We have been independently audited and approved by the Information Security teams of a number of these enterprise clients and are happy to support such security audits / penetration tests for clients.
We are the data processor and not the data owner. We are HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) certified and can enter into BAA’s ( Business Associate Agreements) as required
We are currently undergoing ISO 27001 certification
We are GDPR compliant
We operate a data deletion process which clients will be advised about as part of their onboarding process
We are happy to support Information Security / Data Privacy audits and furnish copies of our various Information Security Policies and Procedures as required (under NDA)
Our platform is independently Penetration tested based on OWASP 10 guidelines
We use the most advanced technologies, protocols and procedures available today to keep your information secure
Our infrastructure is architected for security and redundancy. We can share Business Continuity Plans / Disaster Recovery plans with defined RPOs and RTOs if needed
We use 2 sub-processors Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure
We are continuously improving our Information Security Systems, Policies and Procedures based on the evolving needs of our clients, and responding to changes in the wider environment.
6. How to gain most valuable insight
Mobile ethnography projects are typically diary or task-based. With an emphasis on “show me, don’t tell me”, respondents are tasked with recording how they behave, act and feel in context while completing tasks/activities that are designed to ensure that the respondent behaves in as realistic a manner possible.
By using videos, photos with captions, or text to capture how the respondents behave, act or feel in context, and in the moment, researchers get a more authentic, realistic, media-rich understanding of the everyday lives of the respondents.
The user experience for respondents is simple and fun. Well designed mobile ethnography apps that adopt a social networking / messaging style user experience are instantly familiar to respondents and provide a frictionless experience that enables them to quickly capture moments and share them with the researcher.
Indeemo Task List in App
The immediacy and contextuality of the data capture removes any potential for post rationalization. Furthermore, as the researcher is not present and the respondent is recording how they behave, on their own, in their every-day context, the behaviors and feelings that are captured using mobile ethnography are highly authentic and do not contain the potential distortions possible due to the ‘researcher effect’.
Researchers who use mobile ethnography consistently tell us that the self-recorded behaviors captured in the familiar context of the respondent’s everyday lives are more intimate, authentic, and revealing than any other data collection technique that the researchers have utilized before.
7. Getting Started
The following represents a quick overview of our process, and we explore most of these areas in further detail below.
1. Join a Strategy Call: Our interaction starts with a strategy call with one of our strategists where we listen to your requirements, discuss options and provide insights to help ensure you achieve the outcome you are looking for.
2. Prepare a Project Brief: We help prepare a short project overview that covers your requirements in more detail, assessing which countries you are conducting research in, the numbers of respondents, languages etc
3. Get Quote / Sign Off: We provide a quote for you to review, to discuss and to sign off when ready.
4. Undertake Training: With an initial project we support clients with a mix of in person training, as well as through providing access to an extensive video library of bit sized videos. The application is intuitive and repeat users will skip this step.
5. Create a Task List: This is done in English initially. You send your first draft to Indeemo, we preview this and schedule a screen share to advise you on how best to optimize your discussion guide / Task List to work best on mobile. Allow 2 days to draft the first version with your client, one day to schedule a consultation with Indeemo and 1 day to revise.
6. Set up Your Project: Once this is signed off with the client (where appropriate), you submit the project to Indeemo and we set up the project so you can preview it on the platform. Allow 1 day for this. Allow yourself a further day to preview your tasks in the platform and make any final edits.
Indeemo then sets up the remaining markets and schedules a training session with all your local moderators. (Allow 1 day)
7. Add Observers: If you want / need to add observers you can easily do so from within the application.
8. Manage Respondents: Once you have sourced respondents, and facilitated access you can manage them from within the Indeemo application.
9. Moderate Responses: If you need to encourage responses, or ask for clarification use our moderation feature to ensure respondents are delivering data you can use.
10. Analyse Data: Analyse your data via the intuitive Indeemo researcher dashboard. Using tools such as video transcription, tag coding, keywords, keyword clouds and many mode you will be able to quickly and efficiently analyse the responses.
11. Report on Insights: Once all data is in you will now be able to export, and report on your findings all directly from your dashboard.
12. Delete Data: When the project is complete, in line with your / your client’s security and privacy standards, we will delete all data as agreed.
Generative AI Interview & Focus Group Analysis
You can now import interviews and focus groups into Indeemo from Zoom, Teams or your Computer and analyse them using Generative AI.
8. Project Setup Lead Times
To ensure you have adequate time for training, project set up and adding respondents to Indeemo, please allow the following lead times:
First project (single country): 3 working days
First project (multi country): 4 working days
Subsequent project (single country): 1 working day
Subsequent project (multi country): at least 2 working days
To ensure accuracy in the Project setup, we can only set up projects where all the necessary information has been submitted.
Finally, we also offer an express service for those with urgent requirements.
9. Designing Your Task List
On Indeemo, each unit of research is defined as a project. Within each project, you can set up multiple target groups which are essentially segments or groupings of respondents with similar characteristics e.g. gender, demographics, location, or persona. These typically correlate with the screening criteria that you give to your recruiter.
Each target group is given a task list that contains all of the tasks or activities you need them to complete. Depending on your requirements, all target groups can use the same task list or each target group can be given a different task list.
Think of a task list as a grouping of tasks that tells the respondents what they need to do. The task list screen in the app is where the respondent will repeatedly go to view their tasks and then respond as you instruct them to do
[Indeemo Tip: Ask your account strategist to show you how this works.]
Each task list contains multiple tasks that instruct respondents on what you need them to do. Respondents complete their tasks by uploading photos, notes, videos, or screen recordings. When designing your task list, it is important to remember in many instances that your respondent will be using a Smartphone to read and respond to your tasks so brevity is important. So, what might look short and succinct here in the Word Doc may require a lot of scrolling in the mobile app.
Hence it’s important to keep your tasks short, granular and succinct so that respondents can quickly understand what they need to do, complete it and get on with their day.
Our team will support you through every step of this process to ensure your task list yields the best results. While we can only review task lists in English, tasks can be created in any chosen language with the app available in English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Romanian, Portuguese, Simplified Chinese, Japanese and Korean
10. Recruiting Respondents
Much of the research planning and design for qualitative resarch is the same. This includes recruitment of participants. Essentially, the recruitment process for mobile ethongraphy is the same as the steps you would take for traditional research methods. Your relationship with a recuiter and screener rarely, if ever changes.
One of the keys things you need to do is to outline and include the specs for each smartphone operating system that will be used. There are no changes to fees for recruitment. Through Indeemo, you will have the opportunity to reach out to an array of recruiters to help get your project off the ground, if you do not have ease of access to potential participants. The recruitment process, including screening, typically take two weeks.
Through the recruitment process the screener will transalte relative to the local language of your participants, and required by your client. It is important to get this right for your local market. In addition, and of equal importance is the screening itself. Your recruiter will need to manage this and reach out to each potential participant. A robust screening process will benefit the outcome of your fieldwork
If you are wondering about technical requirement please visit our recruiter support page here.
11. Inviting Respondents to Participate
Onboarding respondents can appear daunting. Particularly if you are new to mobile ethnography and adopting new technology. However, the user interface of mobile apps for exploratory is familiar to many respondents.
The Indeemo platform follows a similar design and interface to Instagram and Facebook. In the context of social networking apps, Indeemo is easy to use with universal design features, making it engaging and familiar for your research participants.
Your respondents will begin to recevie tasks as soon as your project goes live. And to simply put, they can engage and respond to tasks by uploading various media types - Video diaries, text diary entries, photos and selfies, and mobile screen recordings. Relative to your research strategy and objective, respondents can engage with your tasks from anywhere between ten and thirty minutes per day.
12. Incentivising Respondents
Incentives vary considerably depending on the market. In our experience, the US is the most expensive market to incentivise respondents in. Privacy-conscious markets such as Germany can also be more expensive than other countries. Incentives across the main European markets are typically the same. There is also a wide variety in South East Asia, with China being the most expensive.
We are happy to share indicative benchmarks if you have a project to discuss. We always, however, defer to the advice of the recruitment professional in each local market.
Finally, our solution includes reminders as well as submission audit trails to ensure that respondents have completed what they signed up to do in advance of them getting paid.
13. Activating Respondents
Our experience is that researchers prefer to choose how and when they activate respondents and as a result we do not automatically invite respondents when they are added to the system.
When you are ready to invite your respondents to join your project, you will need to email them with your own introductory email which should include instructions on how to download Indeemo.
14. Moderation
Unlike traditional ethnographic research methods and techniques, mobile ethnography enables qualitative data to be viewed and analysed instantly. As your respondents upload their video diaries, the data goes directly to the Indeemo dashboard. Researchers have instant access to the influx of real time data. An added benefit of this involves follow ups. Similar to posts on social media, resarchers can comment on a participants entry, and probe if there are valuable insights emerging.
The private one-to-one component of Indeemo can be empowering for participants. They will usually be more comfortable providing your researchers with more context and expressions of emotions due to this private element of the platform. Indeemo is viewed as a safe space for qualitative insights to be uncovered.
15. Analysing Results
Qualitative data is unstructured, but contains the richest and rawest forms of insights about humans, their experiences, and behaviours. Mobile Ethnography platforms have a diverse range of analytic capabilties that can help you draw out these insights.
Filters can be implemented to swiftly search through dairy entries.
Automated video transcription significantly reduces the time of manual transcribing.
Analytic capabilities also include sophisticated keyword analysis. Researchers can use these to quickly identify trends, and build insights through thematic analysis.
Qualitative data can be organised and structured through tagging.
Tagging affords researchers the ability to conduct through data analysis.
In addition, keyword cloud functionality, timelines, journey mapping visualisation, and collages are all part of the researchers analysis toolkit with mobile ethnography
16. Exporting Data for Reports
When fieldwork is complete you’ll be able to easily export all media from your project. Simply select who you want to receive the media and validate the request and you’ll receive a mail with a link to download the export file. Once you have executed a Search, an Export button will appear to the right of the Search button.
Clicking on export will open a dropdown. You can then download a CSV (Excel compatible) file with all of the metadata for the responses returned by that search. You can also export a Word document. Click on the Word button and you will receive an email with a link available for 48 hours.
Please note this facility is only available to Moderators. Client employees who you invite to Indeemo as observers cannot access this feature.
17. Data Deletion
Your project will be available to you on the Indeemo dashboard for 6 weeks after the end of fieldwork, at which stage you can request a bulk export or an extended hosting service.
You will receive an email during week 7 after the end of fieldwork, to remind you of this deadline and another reminder before we delete your data.
To learn more about our security and all the steps we take towards protecting your data visit our Security page.
18. Support
We pride ourselves in offering *6 star* support ensuring our clients are benefiting from our expertise to support successful outcomes. Each client will also have access to a named contact to ensure that you are supported throughout the process. If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to support@indeemo.com and we will be more than happy to help.
19. Summary
Mobile ethnography is emerging as a valuable methodology for companies looking to enhance their innovation capability. Leveraging the increased power of smartphones, as well as respondents' willingness to film themselves in situ helps researchers uncover unforeseen insights into consumer behavior.
With mobile ethnography, it is now finally possible to get ‘under the skin’ of customers and get a deeper understanding of what really matters to them in a commercially viable and scalable manner.
There is a lot to do when it comes to delivering a successful mobile ethnography project. Here at Indeemo we pride ourselves in the level of service we provide. We are not *selling software* - we are helping our clients elicit rich insights helping you to make better decisions.
If you’d like to discuss how we can support your first Mobile Ethnography project, please use the form below to get in touch now.
About Indeemo
Indeemo's mobile ethnography app and qualitative research platform helps researchers, designers, Insights teams, and brands capture authentic, in-context, in-the-moment behaviors and feelings that help them better understand what really matters to their customers. By merging mobile, video, and private social networking technologies, Indeemo's agile, mobile ethnography solution delivers rich, contextual insights at scale and in real-time.
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