Design anthropology is an interdisciplinary field that seeks to understand the role of design artifacts and processes in defining what it means to be human (e.g., human nature). It is more than lists of user requirements in a design brief, which makes it different from contextual inquiry, some forms of design research, and qualitative focus groups. Design anthropology offers challenges to existing ideas about human experiences and values.
This paper describes a novel approach that combines data from direct observation, user surveys and server logs to analyse users' browsing behaviour. It is based on a longitudinal study of university students' use of a course related website.