Fujiko Suda: Worklife

Recent Ethnography Research, Particularly of Recruitment Challanges in Japan

Jan 22, 2012 00:54 am / Add a comment

Over the past three years, I have become more and more con­cerned with the dif­fi­culty in cre­at­ing highly excit­ing learn­ing ses­sion for for­eign inspiration/innovation seek­ing cus­tomers of both design com­pa­nies and end user com­pa­nies. It has a lot to do with recruit­ing process for peo­ple to research.

I see fol­low­ing prob­lems in recruit­ing, some of points may be par­tic­u­lar to Japan:
1. Lack of ample dis­cus­sion before decid­ing on the brief
If the project man­ager is able to explain the big pic­ture with artic­u­lated pur­pose and gen­eral research direc­tion to recruiter and con­duct open ended, ample dis­cus­sion before decid­ing on the brief, with a good recruiter with rea­son­able amount of time for search, your research could be con­sid­ered already about half done at this point. When ample dis­cus­sion is not held first, recruit­ing brief could be cre­ated to suit Inter­net based recruit­ing agency, which is often too spe­cific for the interview/observation recruit to offer enlight­en­ing find­ings.
2. Too much use of Inter­net based recruit­ing agency
Per­haps in the ear­lier days of the Inter­net, entic­ing respon­dents with small income to talk about the things they loved any­way worked. But now that some peo­ple dis­cov­ered what easy money it could be, and recruit­ing agency hav­ing their list of favorite respon­dents who are artic­u­late and fit into many cat­e­gories, unless it is very spe­cial case such as smok­ing seces­sion or seri­ous marathon run­ner who placed as top 100 at marathons who writes blogs, Inter­net based recruit­ing agen­cies are becom­ing more and more monot­o­nous in pro­duc­ing vanilla fla­vored respon­dents.
3. Cost cut­ting in research
Tied to (2), because research com­pa­nies have been under more pres­sure to cut research cost in any way pos­si­ble, this nat­u­rally affected the bud­get for recruit­ing. Who can cope with lower cost of recruit­ing as well as shorter period to recruit? Inter­net recruit­ing com­pa­nies who has their favorite respon­dents, who are good at get­ting vanilla fla­vored respondents.

Researchers who has been trav­el­ing all over the world told me that it is the case in many of the coun­tries, but infor­ma­tion pri­vacy has become con­cern to peo­ple in gen­eral. In Japan, ever since indi­vid­ual infor­ma­tion pri­vacy law has been enacted about 3 years ago, peo­ple has steadily lost their non­cha­lance about their infor­ma­tion, espe­cially of being filmed and pho­tographed. The mar­ket has matured so much that now, if a per­son signs up with inter­net recruit­ing agency, that per­son is doing it because s/he really wants money bad, and a per­son who vol­un­teers to par­tic­i­pate in mar­ket­ing research pri­mar­ily for money are not open minded and relaxed com­pared to peo­ple who’s biggest inter­est is to ful­fill their curios­ity. Thus, when my team does the recruit­ing now, we are find­ing that we can only go as far as friends of our friends and peo­ple we pre­vi­ously worked with. With the gen­eral mood in Japan as it is a “nor­mal” person’s duty to take very great care of their iden­tity and pri­vacy, recruit­ing per­haps has become 10 times harder than what it was 5 years ago.

This all sounds pes­simistic. It is not.

Come to think of it, research took time and money to do prop­erly. The recent trend has been to see research as some­thing that offers quick fix up ideas. With that kind of start­ing point, not only recruit­ing process, but every­thing about research need to be quick and cheap. In Japan, com­pa­nies that have never done design research, let alone user expe­ri­ence, inno­va­tion research, have begun hir­ing indi­vid­u­als and com­pa­nies who are capa­ble to doing the research right.

The pie itself has grown quite large, but like every­thing else, good research will be rare.

Dis­claimer: The arti­cle is of Fujiko Suda’s cur­rent per­cep­tion, and it is sub­ject to change, could be in many ways as time goes by. Some of the ideas may be rooted in idea gained by some­one else, but Fujiko Suda would only be happy to acknowl­edge the source to share the ideas.

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