Sam Dobbin — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 15:47:19 GMT

Interesting article, though I agree with Cennydd that surrogate users can be problematic. As an example, my current project involves a lot of product development where most of the team has frequent access to users, and some of the team would even qualify as end users themselves. That said, the feedback we get from our internal surrogate users is often clouded by their knowledge of business priorities, and whatever ethnographic research we’ve managed to do externally has often revealed dramatically different things.

This is a good approach where no possibility for ethnographic research exists, but it would be interesting to look at a more guerilla approach to observation studies and other first-hand research.

Boxes and Arrows: Comments by Sam Dobbin