Success in a diverse global marketplace increasingly demands that companies engage customers from diverse global backgrounds in both discussions and usability studies. However, funding for user research travel is becoming more limited, and the availability of local users who meet the need for diversity is often insufficient. Therefore, UX professionals have started using remote usability testing methods to gather adequate user feedback.

6 myths about remote usability studies. Pretty interesting reading for anyone interested in exploring that option.

Because Intel isn’t an OEM customer, a fabless shop, or a foundry, it ends up having to be all three at once if it wants to play the SoC game. That’s one place where the ethnographers come in.

The ethnographers essentially stand in for OEM devicemakers, in that they provide Intel with market-oriented input into the kinds of products that the company should be designing SoCs for. In other words, the user experience researchers can function as substitute “customers,” so that Intel can iterate its products internally in conversation with a kind of “market.”

How Moore’s Law drove Intel into the arms of anthropologists
on Ars Technica