Rapid ethnography

Millen, D. R. (2000). Rapid ethnography: time deepening strategies for HCI field research. In Proceedings of the Conference on Designing interactive Systems: Processes, Practices, Methods, and Techniques. D. Boyarski and W. A. Kellogg, Eds. DIS '00. ACM Press, New York, August 17 - 19, 2000, pp. 280-286:

"Due to increasingly short product realization cycles, there has been growing interest in more time efficient methods, including rapid prototyping and various usability inspection techniques. This paper will introduce "rapid ethnography," which is a collection of field methods intended to provide a reasonable understanding of users and their activities given significant time pressures and limited time in the field. The core elements include limiting or constraining the research focus and scope, using key informants, capturing rich field data by using multiple observers and interactive observation techniques, and collaborative qualitative data analysis. A short case study illustrating the important characteristics of rapid ethnography will also be presented."