Of all of the methods of doing user research, contextual inquiry and ethnography are two of my favorites.  They help you understand your the context that your user is operating in.  Working for VMware, I often think about this in terms of what is happening in a system administrator’s datacenter, what their workspace looks like, what kind of mobile devices they use and why, and so on.

These methods are important for consumer products as well.  Take, for example, Procter and Gamble’s newest men’s razor for the emerging Indian market.  They knew from talking to Indians living in America about some characteristics of Indian men that they would have to take into account in designing their razor.  They even tested a new razor on Indian students at MIT, and that razor failed.  It took a trip to India to understand the context of men shaving there for them to fully understand the user need.  Indian students at MIT had running water to rinse their razor in.  Men in India were using a cup of water to shave, doing it in the dark without a mirror, and the process would take around a half-hour.  They also learned that not cutting themselves was a much larger concern for men in India.

The whole article is a really interesting read about what happens when you think you know your user, or when you think you’ve got a pretty good stand-in for your user.  P&G didn’t know their user, and they didn’t know their context.  Once they understood their user, their concerns, and their context, they were able to develop a razor that captured 9% of the market in India, bringing P&G’s overall market share to 49.1%.

(Thanks to @JakeHercules for the pointer to this article!)