Recently, the company worked with Hallmark to investigate why its Showcase stores weren't generating higher sales. E Lab sent researchers to stores in Pittsburgh, Atlanta, Las Vegas, and Kansas City. For three days in each location, ethnographers used five cameras to record customer behavior. The result was 400 hours of tape. Using CAVEAT, researchers sorted through the footage and organized thousands of images into 70 different keywords that became the basis of their recommendations.
"Some people can figure things out through one wicked insight or intuition," Robinson says. "We're more like inch-worms. We start with the data and slowly aggregate up."
As researchers work with the data, patterns begin to emerge. In the course of analyzing the Hallmark footage, for example, one set of images kept recurring: shoppers would move slowly through the aisles, get discouraged, and leave with only a greeting card. "The store did not do a good job telling people what it was about," Robinson says.
When patterns aren't so clear, E Lab asks customers to explain their own behavior, a process it calls an "anthropump." The company invites people who've been captured on video to watch their tapes as researchers pose questions about what's happening. E Lab often videotapes and dissects these follow-up sessions -- in effect, analyzing research subjects analyzing themselves.
How have E Lab's ideas influenced product development? Thomson's hoped-for killer innovation is still in design, but the company says E Lab's research is shaping its strategy. Hallmark has redesigned its Showcase stores based on E Lab's critique, using a vocabulary borrowed from city planning. In the new stores, customers navigate "paths" linking "districts" marked by "landmarks" of high-visibility products.
For now, though, E Lab's most important product is its philosophy for exploring what makes great products. "Too many features can kill a product," warns Robinson. "You don't have to match a competitor feature for feature. You have to give customers what they want. We're trying to help companies go beyond what's possible or what's 'cool' to what resonates with people's needs."
Bruce G. Posner (fair26@aol.com) is an editor and writer living in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He has served on the staffs of "Harvard Business Review" and "Inc."
E Lab uses a tool dubbed the "Madden Board," after the boisterous football commentator, to examine video footage from multiple points of view. As videotape plays on a giant screen, up to six people, each armed with a telestrator and an electronic pen with different-colored "ink," can highlight important events, diagram how people move around and make decisions, and carefully annotate the tape.
What's in your backpack? To gather data about how junior-high-school students stay in touch with their families and keep track of important information, E Lab sent disposable cameras -- along with $100 per person -- to a group of young people. The kids agreed to photograph the contents of their backpacks as well as all the places in their homes where family members post notices and schedules : the refrigerator door, bulletin boards, the kitchen table.
Home-grown software called CAVEAT allows researchers to index video images by activity, environment, type of interaction, and user experience. For example, E Lab studied a new line of Hallmark gift stores to determine why customers weren't buying more products. After analyzing 400 hours of videotape, E Lab concluded that the layout was confusing shoppers. The patterns of confusion became so evident that E Lab researchers could watch video of prospective customers entering the store and predict with uncanny accuracy where they would freeze up and walk away.
University of Chicago researchers used beepers to study mood swings among teenagers. E Lab used them to research home entertainment. "We were looking for data about interactions with music," says John Cain. "When and where do people use it? You can't put enough video cameras in enough places to get that kind of information."
Sometimes the most compelling insights come from the least structured research. Early in most projects, E Lab sends ethnographers to record "guerrilla video" -- handheld taping in a wide range of public settings to frame an initial set of questions. One exercise in guerrilla video documented how often kids, rather than their parents, pushed baby strollers -- a finding with obvious implications for product design.
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