As part of our ongoing research efforts to understand our users, we spent three weeks in Chicago in April 2015 to conduct ethnographic research in collaboration with the Hive Chicago team. Learning from this study can be found in this Research Report from Chicago : mzl.la/chicago.
During our previous six months of research, we focused mainly on emerging countries and conducted studies in India, Bangladesh, Kenya and Brazil. With this project in Chicago, we intended to analyze the similarities and differences between our audience in emerging markets and our audience in North America.
As a result, we curated in-depth conversations with 69 participants from various communities, and talked with 41 teenagers, 12 informal educators and program managers, 13 parents and three bloggers.
In this report you will find:
– A description of how people understand and engage with the Web in Chicago through the Web Journey framework. We cover behaviors, skills, blockers, mechanisms of entry and motivations.
– A comparison between our observations in emerging markets and our observations in Chicago.
– Key findings, such as:
Being Internet famous is better than just being famous
Remixes are for glory
Learning code is not appealing
There exists a gap in current learning product offerings
Libraries are a safe zone for parents
…
– A deep dive on teenagers with a Webmaker user segmentation and three selected portraits
– A deep dive on informal educators with a similar structure
– A benchmark on learning products
– A set of recommendations for our strategy, our learning products and our learning programs
– A list of 110 things that people want to learn details about our research methods
We would love to hear your feedback and questions. Feel free to reach out to laurad@mozillafoundation.org.