When you need to understand the way people use their cars, a focus group or interview isn’t going to cut it – you’ve got to see it happen.

Like all of our native environment research, the B|P automotive research model is based on the idea that to learn about a common-but-complex activity like driving, you’ve got to gear up, get in the car with real people, and watch them do real things. With a video camera, a laptop, and a go-anywhere internet connection, we ride along with users as they go about their daily routines, while our moderator listens, watches, and talks to the driver. We broadcast the whole process live over the web to our observers, so they can be right there with us.

More than an interview, more than observing from a distance, our ethnographic research gives you the whole story: we get deep into people’s lives to uncover how people use technology while driving (for better or worse), the ways they adapt to the logistic and technological limitations of a car, and how their car fits into their everyday lives.

The Method

After a lengthy interview, in which the participants demonstrate and talk about the technologies they use most, our moderator and cameraman climb into their car with them and hit the road. Instead of telling the participants what to do – which we always believe is a bad idea in research – we leave the task entirely up to the participant – they might go to the supermarket, commute to work, or pick up their children from school.

While users drive and talk, our moderator takes detailed notes about every aspect of the process – behaviors, motivations, context, and both explicit and implicit verbal cues, telling the whole story about the driver.

Live Webcasts and Moderator Chat

In addition to being broadcast live over the web with our wireless EV-DO connection, the entire process is also filmed in high-definition video, which can be viewed later at any point. Clients can also communicate with the moderator in real-time over IM, in case they notice anything they want to learn more about.

Visualizing the Data

After the research is all done, we bring it all together – notes, videos, and pictures – in a way thats easy for our clients to visualize. All of the photos are fully tagged to make it easy to search, for example, for all participants using cell phones while they drive. The moderator’s notes are also tagged and color-coded by issue and made available in a spreadsheet. Highlight videos are created to bring all the interesting moments to surface – though of course, you can also watch the recordings in their entirety, whenever you want.