I am anthropologist interested in how humans interact with digital technology. But there is no
need to be anthropologist to observe how people get irritated with technology when it doesn’t
meet their expectatons. All of us have plenty of our own (oftentimes frustrating) experience of
this kind. In order to cope with this challenge, IT corporations have been launching studies of
user experience and of users’ everyday life, so that to design new technology able to offer new
experiences, create new contexts, and meet the needs of particular groups of users. I will tell
some stories about ethnography as a method of study, and will also dwell on user modeling by
means of personas, and on Wizard of OZ user simulation.