[tweetmeme]As we all know, field research is essential to understand your customer, their environment, and generate relevant design opportunities. It also takes a huge amount of time, can be expensive and if you’re doing it internationally, it may be the only shot you have so you’d better get it right.

In this blog series, we’ll discuss some techniques for doing international field research successfully: planning, what to do when you’re in field, data analysis, and communicating your findings. We hope they are useful and spark some conversation as well!

This is a 4 part series. Check out the other entires below:
1. Setting Up the Plan
2. Lessons from the Field
3. Organizing and Analyzing Data
4. Communicating Your Results

Planning

Like any research project, you have to figure out your goals, methods, timelines, etc in the planning stage. International research adds some complexity to this as: 1) You may not be familiar with the environment or culture at all & 2) You’re in field for a very limited amount of time and likely won’t get the opportunity to go back. So, what do you do? Find out as much as you can, about everything you can, before you go.

The local agency you partner with to arrange participant recruiting is a great resource for local knowledge, but they likely won’t provide their opinion or advice unless asked.

Ask them for advice on how to build rapport with participants: is a quick introduction ok or is it better to have a quick bite together first? You’ll need to build this time into your session.

What are the topics you should be careful about? For example, when I was doing research in India, we asked female head of households their income and spending when their husbands weren’t around, as those females that earned more than their husbands would under report their income and spending when their husbands were there as not to embarrass them.

How many people can comfortably attend the research? If you are doing research in someone’s home for example, their living quarters can be really small, so you may only have room for yourself and the translator. It is good to know this upfront so you can plan sessions ahead that other team members can attend.

Other areas to ask questions about include: safety, session lengths, cultural norms and greetings, whether it is appropriate to video record the sessions , etc.

Once you’ve settled on your recruiting criteria, with the local agency’s input of course (!), recruit participants early and start collecting data remotely. This is extremely important for a few reasons. You’ll find out early if you are going to run into recruiting glitches and will have time to plan accordingly. On one project, we were doing research in schools in China and it took 3 weeks to connect with the schools’ principal to get permission to observe and interview her teachers.

Ask participants to fill out workbooks and take pictures of their lives and have these sent to you weeks before you are in field. With this data, you can ensure you are getting participants that meet your criteria and nothing was lost in translation with your local recruiting agency. You can also use this as a method to narrow down participants; choosing the ones that were most responsive or descriptive, for example, using this as a predictor to get the most fruitful participants in field.

This data early on can also help you focus your discussion while you are in field; you can use the collected data as jumping off points for new conversation topics, or alternatively, you can leave out certain topics as you have already collected enough beforehand.

Lastly, this data can also result in rich artifacts. Pictures of important friends and family members you may not get to meet while in field serve as powerful ways to illustrate a participant’s life, while a few sentences about their life goals in their own handwriting adds authenticity to your story telling.

Phew! I could go on for another few pages! I’ll leave you with this for now. Stay tuned for the next series in this blog: tips for success while you are in field.

Data collection in India. Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/danielbachhuber/2737149619