Ethnography for
Software Development
Anne Kirah MSN/Microsoft Corporation
Carolyn Fuson MSN/Microsoft Corporation
Jonathan Grudin Microsoft Research
Evan Feldman Microsoft Corporation
Ethnographers have contributed to industry as organizational consultants and
in mediating labor disputes for the better part of a century. In addition, they
have contributed to the design of commercial products since well before the
software era. Companies and industries as varied as General Motors Corp (Kane,
1996), Kimberly-Clark (Feldman, 1999), Nokia (Lindholm et al., 2003), and
Motorola (Kupfer, 2000) all have long seen the value of ethnographic research
in product ...