Now that you've learned one particular way of conducting qualitative research, which involves interviews, observations, and affinity walls, I'd like to talk a little bit about the larger context of different kinds of qualitative research. So, you understand the particular method that you learned is actually one of many, many different ways in which you can conduct qualitative research. So, as I mentioned early on in the course, this course does not cover a whole range of methodologies that are sometimes used in user needs assessments, whether they are the creation of personas for different subsets of users or log analysis in which you might do an analysis of the data that's collected by a product. They're also focus groups, you can run workshops, you might want to run A/B tests where you experiment with different kinds of features, and so on. All of these are different ways to uncover user needs, none of which we have talked about in great detail in this course. However, you might want to refer to some of the other courses in the UX MicroMasters to learn some of these other techniques. Qualitative research, as I've mentioned, is not so much a single methodology as much as it is a whole grab bag of methodologies in which you deal with non-numerical data, often interact directly with people and with their working contexts, and get a lot of richness in detail. So, let me suggest that what we've learned in terms of interviews, observations, and affinity walls is actually very closely related to some other kinds of methodologies, and I want to make sure that you understand that what you've learned is similar to some other techniques so that you can say, if somebody asks you, "Do you have any experience with user-centered design or user-centered research?" You can actually say, "Yes, I've at least have tried some one particular method of qualitative research." The kind of qualitative research that we learned in this course is sometimes called ethnographic research, because it's related in some ways to the ethnographic methodology that's used by anthropologists. Of course, what we do is much, much lighter than what professional ethnographers do, because they will often tend to spend a year or two in the field, really observing and interacting with people that they're studying. The methodology is also called contextual inquiry, sometimes. There is a entire science of what's called contextual design, in which the idea is to understand the larger context in which a product or service is used as a way to gain insights into it, and the methodology that we've learned in this course takes elements from contextual inquiry. Affinity walls, on their own, are sometimes also called affinity diagrams, and then in some communities, particularly the entrepreneurial community, they're often called the KJ Method, named because the affinity walls were originally invented by a man named Jiro Kawakita. It's called the KJ method, and not the JK method, because in Japanese, you often say the family name first. But this man was again an anthropologist who did a lot of work in Nepal and what he wanted to understand was how to take all of the data he had amassed over months of ethnography and put it together in a way that they could analyze it so that they could provide interventions for the Nepalese communities that he worked with that would be to their benefit. Interestingly, he thought he was coming up with a methodology that was different from kind of Western analytical thought, but in the end, we found that it's just as useful for the qualitative research that we would do in any context. Finally, of course, affinity walls are one way to do qualitative data analysis. So, hopefully, you've gotten a sense that the techniques that you've learned, while only a subset of the larger kinds of techniques available to people who do qualitative research, you've learned a really powerful methodology that can apply in a whole range of contexts. User needs assessments themselves are often considered a part of user-centered design, human-centered design, ethnographic design, empathic design, contextual design, UX design, and UX research. Now, in this course, we haven't focused so much on the design component, but most of these forms of design that you see on the screen are exactly those in which the design is preceded by a qualitative research phase often involving interviews, observations, and some kind of data analysis. I also want to mention that even though the techniques that you learned are relatively few in number, they have very broad applicability. So, for example, in my own research I've used them to study how rural farmers in India interact with their mobile phones, how different groups in Uganda might interact with a new digital device. There are some cases where I've studied how people take home videos and what they do with them as well as how, in a corporate office setting, they might take videos shot in the office and put them together for training materials. So, that's just in terms of user needs assessment and product design. But again, qualitative research can be applicable to even wider range of different kinds of research. You can use it for anthropological or sociological research and you can use it for market research and understanding customers in a whole range of contexts.
