Bonny Colville-Hyde of CX Partners has written a good introductory article on the value of ethnographic research.
How can you ensure your service stands out from its competitors in the marketplace as the one people want to use?
One way is to uncover how your users interact with you and find new ways to support their behaviours’.
Usability research can show you how successfully users engage with your website and how you can improve it to better fit user needs, but ethnographic research can tell you about the circumstances users go through before they interact with you online, and tell you about user’s needs that you weren’t aware of.
Understanding user motivations is the key to developing your website into a service that people actively want to use.