Thick description and its understanding will help in personal note-taking and information architecture
Thick description is about choosing things that will have sufficient ambiguity to be meaningless without context
Knowing when to dive deep into thick description is useful in providing context and cultural significance
Adding just one sentence to provide context can make notes more useful and understandable
Sam Ladner is a sociologist, UX researcher, and student of productivity and the nature of work. She’s been a researcher at Amazon and Microsoft, and is currently Senior Principal Researcher at Workday. Sam is the author of two books on research, Practical Ethnography and Mixed Methods. In this conversation, we discuss sociology and ethnography in the context of organizations and how to manage the knowledge generated by research.