In case you missed it, here’s Dr. Ladner talking to the CBC about RIM’s new CEO. Skip to 5:35 in the video for the full story.
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Meet RIM’s new CEO Thorsten Hein
Here he is, recently installed. Will he change RIM’s direction? Mr. Hein tells you a lot about why the board picked him, it seems, but not a lot about why he’s going to change RIM.
Note that he specifically speaks directly to RIM employees, which is a strange thing to do on a public channel. Do RIM employees not know him already? Why did he feel to stress shipping on time and with good quality? Why did he say they need more prototyping?
Perhaps the word internally is that the problems the company is facing is an engineering problem: poor quality and lateness. Outside, however, it looks like the consumer business is where they’re failing.
Let’s see what Mr. Hein can do.
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Mobile research update
Since we launched our recruitment of participants last May, the Mobile Work Life team has
- Completed 29 field interviews (for those of you who have done field interviews, you’ll know how long that takes!)
- Transcribed 29 field interviews of around 2 hours each. This is a huge feat in itself!
- Installed a server version of qualitative data analysis Nvivo
- Created an Nvivo project file
- Collated several thousand academic articles in an Endnote database
- Uploaded several dozen photographs to our qualitative dataset
- Team coded for inter-rater reliability
- Coded all 29 transcripts along several dozen themes
- Authored 2 separate papers (currently under review)
- Planned and begun 3 additional papers
- Given 1 invited lecture about the results
Academic research is often difficult to share because of the long gap between researching and publishing. We have shared via Twitter and this blog some of the findings, and as soon as we have a publication accepted, we will share that here too!
Thanks for tuning in.
Posted in recruitment, research
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Visualizing our data
We’ve been experimenting with Vue, an open-source tool made by Tufts University. One of the things we’re wanting to communicate is the general frequency of particular variables among our participants. How many are married? How many have kids? How many use BlackBerrys?
Below is our first pass at using Vue to quickly communicate what could have been a boring old frequency table. The numbers on the right are the code names for our participants. Note how view gives varying weights to the lines, indicating the strength of the relationship.
DeviceType and Ownership
While this diagram doesn’t really tell us much in terms of analysis, it does quickly tell us that we had mostly BlackBerry users and mostly using smartphones for 1-2 years.
We are continuing to experiment with Vue and other visualization techniques. Stay tuned for more insight!
Posted in findings, mobile, research
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Initial Findings on Mobile Work Life
I was recently invited to speak at The Social Media Breakfast in Ottawa. In this presentation, I summarized some of our high-level findings so far. In the video, Alex Reid interviews me about the presentation and together, we pull out some key findings.
We are in the process of sifting through the data, so these are only snippets of the overall findings:
- Work/life balance isn’t necessarily destroyed with smartphone use; company culture matters more
- We are changing the way we manage time through electronic calendaring
- Special finding for marketers at the end!
The video itself isn’t the greatest quality but the sound is perfect. Enjoy!
Posted in domestic use, ethnography, mobile, research
Tagged blackberry, family, home, iphone, marketing, mobile
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Wading through data: meditating on qualitative data analysis
Qualitative data analysis is perhaps the most under-rated research skill. Many people see qualitative research as simply “talking to people,” which results, inevitably, in a pile of notes and no connection.
As we move through the mid-way point in our field work, the major issue we need to grapple with is data reduction. Miles and Huberman’s (quite dated) book Qualitative Data Analysis, is a good source for reduction and synthetic techniques.
One technique we are using is the conceptually clustered matrix, which is essentially a summary table, listing research questions in columns and participants in rows. Ours will look something like this.
Conceptual Cluster Matrix
We can also use this matrix format to summarize new, emergent findings that we’ve discovered, such as where mobile devices “live” and “go to sleep” in the home.
This kind of ordering is critical when you’re doing ethnographic work. Data have a way of exploding during observation, and good qualitative researchers must stay focused by trimming, reducing, reflecting and always summarizing what they do.
Other ways to reduce data include:
- Writing up case summaries around tightly focused research questions
- Visualizing time-sequenced events (if your topic is about process or change)
- Open-sorting early and pruning categories down by hierarchically organizing them
- Cognitive maps of individual users (which could become all users’ mental models)
- Soft systems analysis and visualization using CATWOE
Ultimately, the only way to grapple with qualitative data is to get your hands dirty. Unlike quant research, qual research requires you to live in complexity for extended periods. That’s the fun part!
Posted in anthropology, ethnography, findings, methodology, research
Tagged analysis, ethnography, findings, methodology, mobile
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In the midfield: emerging themes in domestic mobile use
The research team has been busy the last few weeks conducting ethnographic interviews in participants’ homes. We’ve gotten semi-lost, wiped our feet, taken off our shoes, played with pets, said hello to spouses, and even gotten a “spa treatment” from a six-year-old daughter of a participant.
Field work is full of surprises. Sometimes participants just stop calling you back. Sometimes they forget you’re coming. Sometimes they just don’t open the door. I personally have experienced all of these instances in past field work. I’m delighted to say that our participants are almost uniformly engaged, animated, and curious about our work.
So far, we’ve learned:
- Smartphones have “homes” within homes: participants usually assign a spatial location (or sometimes several locations) to their smartphones. These “homes” are symbolically thick. A smartphone that “lives” in the office is not the same device as one that “lives” in the bedroom. So far, we’ve found that the bedroom still appears to be place relatively free of technology, including smartphones. Interestingly, the iPad has started to creep into the bedroom as a tool for reading.
- Smartphones aren’t breaking existing temporal norms, just bending them: participants are telling us they pay more attention to unspoken social norms of their work place first, and the smartphone second. For example, one participant told us that emails tend to come until 11 or 12 at night, and start again at around 6 a.m. Another participant, with the same functionality on his phone, says he gets a “morning block” and then another “afternoon block” of emails. It’s not the technology determining these times, but existing social norms.
- Some phones are more “plugged in” than others: All participants have other technology in their homes, but some participants are integrating their smart phones more closely to this “ecosystem” than others. The BlackBerry for work is not getting much integration, but the iPhone that controls the stereo sure is. The Android phone has replaced the family camera, but the BlackBerry still remains a “work device.”
- Smartphones bind families closer: some participants told us that their texting increased when they upgraded to a smartphone. A discrete text to one’s spouse is easily tolerated in the workplace, making it much easier to stay in touch than through voice only. Partners tend to be sending quick texts to each other throughout the day, thereby binding their lives closer together and facilitating their domestic management.
We will be fleshing out these initial themes as we go forward with our project. We invite conversation with members of the public, and of course, from our participants! Join us on this quest to understand what these devices are doing for — and to — us!
Posted in domestic use, findings, mobile, research
Tagged domestic use, findings, location, mobile
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Starting in the field: initial observations
Yesterday, our research team gathered for what we called a “warm-up exercise” for our upcoming field work. We were “stretching” our ethnographic muscles by going out and doing some preliminary observation. We split into two groups and fanned out around Toronto’s Eaton Centre. Our study will involve observation, so we were looking for behaviours with mobile phones. Our study is also cultural, so we were looking for “symbols” or things people use to convey meaning.
What we found:
- “The Bobblehead”: people who are texting while walking engage in an interesting “bobblehead” physicality. They look down at their phone, and (sparingly) up at oncoming pedestrian traffic. With increased pedestrian traffic, they “bobble” more quickly. This bobblehead move indicates the deep engagement they have with this “other world” of their phones. They are isolated from the local surroundings.
- Moving through urban space: Not everyone was using their mobile phone as they moved through the city, but many were. The mobile phone has become a common accompaniment for moving through the urban landscape. It’s a habit. No wonder we have a hard time stopping people from texting and driving — they’re very used to texting and moving.
- “Anticipatory Handling”: interestingly we noticed many people just walking with their phones in their hands. They weren’t talking or texting, or even noticing the phone really. But they had it “ready to hand” (as Heidegger might say). Are they actually using the phone at this point? Are they waiting for it to ring? We need more insight here.
- “Attachment Paradox”: More than one person we talked to said that their mobile phone meant nothing to them. “It’s just a device. There’s no attachment to it,” said one person. Yet, this same person said she’d “panic” if she lost it. How can they be anxious of its loss, yet “unattached” at the same time? Again, more work to be done here.
In the coming weeks, we’ll be talking to people about their phones. We’re also going to be “visiting” them AND their phones. We want to see them use their phones, hold their phones, put them done and forget them, pick them up and put them away. We want to see how these devices live (and work) with us.
Stay tuned for more. We’re pretty excited.
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Finding out more about mobile phones: we need your help!
Did you get the Census form in the mail? Did it ask about mobile phone use? No? Consider talking with us.
Posted in mobile, recruitment, research
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University study seeks to help law firms struggling with work/life balance
Ryerson University’s Ted Rogers School of Management is looking to partner with a local law firm to learn more about how they use mobile technology and its effect on work/life balance. The research team is looking for a law firm whose lawyers are currently using BlackBerrys, iPhones or other smart phones for business purposes.
In return for participating in the study, the research team will partner with the firm to develop actionable policy for productive mobile technology use. The participating firm can use this policy to
- attract and retain talent
- better manage lawyers’ billable time
- be better equipped for the mobile revolution that is currently rolling into business
The research is being managed by Dr. Sam Ladner, postdoctoral fellow and an experienced private-sector consultant. Dr. Ladner has consulted Fortune 1000 companies on technology and innovation and is looking to provide the same service to a local firm. The research entails highly trained social scientists visiting the firm, observing everyday technology use, and interviewing key members of the team. The vast majority of this research is unobtrusive, with a researcher simply observing. This research is completely anonymous and bound by the high standard of university ethics boards’ commitment to complete confidentiality.
If you or your firm is interested, please contact Dr. Ladner at sladner@ryerson.ca.