While at frog, I devised a new method for conducting rapid ethnographic research around the world involving volunteer contributors. FrogMob is a way to quickly collect photos of everyday life from all over the world on a specific topic. It’s used as a research input at the beginning of design projects to look for novel solutions to everyday situations that we wouldn’t normally see or know about in our home country.

From 2008-2015, frog launched over 50 frogMobs for topics like workbenches, coffee makers, cooking in India, power cord management, work bikes, personal audio, and car dashboards.

Lightweight Crowdsourcing

The goal was to make participation as lightweight as possible while capturing key insights. We announced new frogMobs on frog’s Twitter account, which had over 100,000 followers worldwide. Each frogMob would last about two weeks, and the results would stay posted online for everyone to see.

Photos could be uploaded via the web or an iPhone app. The core idea was to present all the submissions as a photo collage while highlighting the top contributors in a leaderboard in the right sidebar. A word cloud highlighted frequently used tags, and a second leaderboard showed the top locations where photos were taken. Clicking images revealed stories and observations.