Qualitative Research in the 21st Century
The virtual home visit
Identifying people insights in the virtual world
Nicole Reinhold & Karma Lendup
Abstract
In this paper, we describe our newly developed research method to explore people’s behavior, values and needs in the virtual environment.
This research reaffirms our faith in conducting studies in the real context, if at all we have to genuinely understand people needs, values and behavior. In our case, it meant investigating people online, in their virtual environment. For this purpose, we use Web 2.0 technologies, in order to reflect the full facets of Philips Design people research methods for design innovation.
We discuss our research methodology while presenting the results of a research project about user-generated content. The study has been conducted online in 2007 with participants from India and the United States.
Nicole Reinhold
Philips Design, Netherlands
Nicole Reinhold is a Senior Research Consultant with Strategic Design group at Philips Design, The Netherlands.
She is researching people behavior and social cultural trends to support design and innovation. Whereby, she continuously interested to develop and evaluate new research methods - especially in the online domain.
Nicole has worked in R&D at DaimlerChrysler and E-Business within Philips Consumer Electronics. She graduated in 1995 from the University of Frankfurt am Main, Germany with a M. A. of Sociology.
Karma Lendup
Philips Design, India
Karma is a Senior Product Designer at Philips design, Pune, India. He is involved with research and product design projects for Emerging Markets with a focus on people & cultural insights.
He is a graduate of the National Institute of Design, (NID) Ahmedabad, India. He briefly joined The School of Design, Hong Kong Polytechnic University as a Design Research Assistant in 2001.
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