To understand the behaviour of my client's customers I ran a diary study, and supplemented this with a cultural probe. The probe kit was sent to participants and allowed them to use different ways to describe, document and share how they shop.
Cultural probes offer a distinctive way to gather customer feedback, and potentially provide more direct inspiration for solution design than traditional methods such as interviews.
For this project we were interested in both the qualitative perspective of the customer, but also some key data around where and when they shopped, who with, and how those different shopping trips varied.
We were researching offline shopping, despite this research being for an e-commerce company, because we were also keen to understand how shopping differed and the ways in which there was an interplay between channels.
Note the materials were hand-written, to encourage more personal responses from participants.
