Longitudinal study: Cultural probes

Discovery / ExplorationqualitativeIntermediate

TL;DR

A kit of purpose-made materials — postcards with open questions, a camera, maps, a diary — that people take away, use over a few weeks, and send back.

Detailed description

Cultural probes were created by Bill Gaver, Tony Dunne and Elena Pacenti in the Presence Project, working with groups of older people in Oslo, the Bijlmer and Peccioli, and published in interactions in 1999. The original proposition is more radical than it is usually remembered: one section of the article is titled "Inspiration, not Information", and the authors state that the probes were not designed to be analysed, nor did they summarise what the returns revealed as an explicit stage of the process. Nor did they want participants to set the direction of the design: they describe themselves as provocateurs.

What UX practises today is a later adaptation, the one method kits and the service-design literature carry: you start from a research question, set a period of use, and close with a retrospective interview. That is the version this entry describes.

Main objective

See someone's context through what they choose to record when nobody is watching.

Use cases

Home and everyday lifeLittle-known domainsAudiences unlike the teamEarly concept phases

When to use it

When you need material from a context you cannot enter and you do not yet know what to ask. It pays off early, to open up the question space, not at the end to confirm a hypothesis. And the materials are designed for those people and that place: Gaver warns that a generic kit produces pieces that feel insincere.

Effort level

High

Recommended number of users

5–10 participants

Advantages

It goes where you cannot: The kit travels to homes, routines and times of day you will not observe, and it does so without your presence shaping the scene.
It opens questions rather than closing them: Ambiguous, evocative material provokes responses no direct question would have produced. That is its stated purpose.
The return rate is itself data: In the original project they read how much each group sent back as information about that group, not as a fieldwork problem.
It carries the context to the team: The photos and objects that come back convey far more to someone who was not there than a written report does.

Disadvantages

It does not produce evidence of needs: It is an instrument of inspiration. Asking it to justify a product decision asks for something its authors explicitly said it does not give.
The analysis is the adaptation, not the method: Gaver and his co-authors did not analyse the returns. Indexing, clustering and pattern-finding is later practice: useful, but declared as such rather than attributed to the original.
A generic kit ruins it: The authors warn that templated materials feel insincere, like an official form with a veneer of marketing. Designing them to fit costs time and money.
Returns are slow and partial: Material comes back over weeks, and sometimes it does not come back. In the original project one of the three groups returned less than half.

When to use

•Research start
•Contexts you cannot observe
•When you do not yet know what to ask
•Exploring a new domain

Metrics

•Kits handed out and returned
•Return rate per group
•Pieces returned per participant
•New questions the material opened

Practical example

Give eight people a kit with a camera, postcards carrying open questions and a map of their neighbourhood, leave it with them for two weeks, and use what comes back to decide what is worth asking in the interviews that follow.

Related methodologies

Related Resources

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