Adaptive Path Blog

Understanding user motivations and intentions is critical to designing good experiences. In most cases the users we speak with are comfortable with products with complex interactions and deep functionality. The Mobile Literacy project gave us the opportunity to speak with people who live in rural areas of the developing world who bring a fresh, unblemished perspective on the devices we take for granted: mobile phones.

For this project, our researchers Natasha Alani and Sebastian Heycke set out to uncover the needs of a population that product designers and manufacturers often overlook and who are not part of a typical product target market. Natasha Alani, our lead design researcher, describes her motivations:

“Empowering the underserved is a long-held theme of my personal and professional life. While living in both rural Uganda and China, I recognized that mobile phones had reached the most remote areas, yet people often turned to me and other westerners for help with basic actions. For this research project, we chose the Kutch region of India because I speak the local language and would be able to get natural observations of people’s experience with mobile phones. Through our research, we were able to see that this often illiterate population had not been previously exposed to concepts such as heirarchial menus or scrolling text, and icons that had no cultural relevance. In addition, rural populations often don’t receive the benefit of thoughtful design because their needs are not advocated for and the primary research is not effectively shared with the greater design community.”

Below is a map of the Kutch district of western India with markers for each interview site.

You can download the research participant profiles to learn more about the people we interviewed. The profiles include a photograph of the participant, basic demographic information, and some interesting information from the interview.

Research Methods

Performing research in rural areas of developing countries is different, to say the least. It isn’t possible to contact a traditional research recruiter to find your target population demographic, stopping people in the street isn’t met with success, and walking into a small rural village asking for folks who haven’t used a mobile device before was only met with skepticism and more questions about our true intentions.

Natasha and Sebastian discovered that in order to identify research subjects you need to entrench yourself in their society, understand the social rules for gaining trust and accessing information, and then, like everyone else in that culture, use that system to slowly work from one contact to another until you find the ideal research subject. To this end, we owe a large debt to Abhiyan, an NGO initially set up to support recovery efforts from a major cyclone in 1998 and then remained to support recovery from a major earthquake that hit the district in 2001. Their approach, “which is marked by a fundamental belief in self-help, confidence-building and enabling local villagers to meet, organize and carry out their own needs assessment and handing over the relief operations to the hands of the “beneficiaries” with minimum supervision” has led to an active role in the Kutch community to set up a framework for self-governance and development. After an extensive interview, they agreed to give our design researchers access to their network of workers and volunteers. Our intention of making this research available under Creative Commons was instrumental to this agreement.

While Abhiyan provided a way into the community, each person along the way also needed to be told of our research intentions and our desire to make this research available to everyone. And step by step, person by person, community by community, our researchers went from one of the largest Indian cities, to a regional commercial center, to a small rural village, to a family compound on the edge of the Thar desert.

This was the most extreme design research that we have ever undertaken. Our practitioners experienced extreme conditions, in Bhuj they slept in guest houses and when they went into they villages and family compounds they slept on mats on the ground. They arrived in India after the monsoon season and were exposed to high temperatures (30ºC/90ºF). They carried all of the recording equipment (voice and video recorders, notebooks, cameras) as well as all the water they may need for a day or two as they traveled by local bus, motorcycle, or hired car. This was coupled with the stress of negotiating in a new and very different culture to get to ideal candidates for this research.

When Natasha and Sebastian finally met with a research participant, they observed the participant in their environment, meeting their family, sharing a meal, and for those who lived in very rural areas, staying the night at their compound sleeping on the dirt floor of a village hut, before an interview began. This allowed the design researchers to observe how the participants lived and conducted business before a single question was asked. Clearly one advantage in performing this research was the team that we had available to us. Natasha is descended from the Kutch area and is able to speak Kutchii, which allowed for a smaller team as we didn’t have to depend on translators.

The Primary Research

Below you will find the videos from our research interviews and our research findings. Some of the original videos were quite long, but for the purposes of this research we narrowed the footage to the most compelling sections. All of this work is being released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License. We know that many companies might be able to use this research and findings to validate research and assumptions they many already have. If you do use our research, we’d like to request you make a donation to Abhiyan, the NGO that is continuing to provide support for the self-organization of Kutch communities and was instrumental in making the research possible.

To make a donation to Abhiyan:
Name of the Bank: Punjab National Bank, Bhuj Branch, Station Road, Bhuj.
Name of the account holder: Kutch Nav Nirman Abhiyan
Bank Account No.: 126 00 00 100 17 44 60
Bank Swift Code: PUNB IN BB KFZ
Sort Code: -NIL-
IBAN: -NIL-

Abhiyan’s address:
Kutch Nav Nirman Abhiyan
Dr. Rajaram Campus, Nr. St. Xaviers School,
Bhuj-Kutch-370001.
Telefax: (02832) 221379/82
Website: www.kutchabhiyan.org
email: abhiyanad1@gmail.com

Our goal is for this research to make an impact on the lives of the participants in the area, either through new devices, services, or donations to the people that made this research possible.

Amer

Mobile Literacy Design Research Interview: Amer from Adaptive Path on Vimeo.
Download the interview transcript.

Besera

Mobile Literacy Design Research Interview: Besera from Adaptive Path on Vimeo.
Download the interview transcript.

Hasnain

Download the interview transcript.

Hitesh

Mobile Literacy Design Research Interview: Hitesh from Adaptive Path on Vimeo.
Download the interview transcript.

Jeshi

Mobile Literacy Design Research Interview: Jeshi from Adaptive Path on Vimeo.
Download the interview transcript.

Kalpesh

Download the interview transcript.

Paroo

Mobile Literacy Design Research Interview: Paroo from Adaptive Path on Vimeo.
Download the interview transcript.

Rajinder

Mobile Literacy Design Research Interview: Rajinder from Adaptive Path on Vimeo.
Download the interview transcript.

Sunil

Mobile Literacy Design Research Interview: Sunil from Adaptive Path on Vimeo.
Download the interview transcript.

Tulsi

Mobile Literacy Design Research Interview: Tulsi from Adaptive Path on Vimeo.
Download the interview transcript.

Umer

Mobile Literacy Design Research Interview: Umer from Adaptive Path on Vimeo.
Download the interview transcript.

We are happy to announce that Scott Berkun will keynote our Managing Design Projects conference in February. This is very exciting for us and having heard Scott present in the past I am confident he will really get things off on the right foot. We have also posted the schedule of the day’s activities to give everyone a taste of what is to come.

As my colleague Julia mentioned a few weeks ago, after looking for events that focused on project management we found the field largely dominated by tools developers (Hello Microsoft!) and the Project Management Institute both of which didn’t feel like they addressed the particular needs of project managers who work in the design field. So we created our own!

The goals of the event are to identify some best practices, common work-arounds, key tools and begin a conversation with our peers that we have admired seeing our colleagues enjoy with both the IXDA and IA Summit. Since PMs don’t necessarily go to the same places to get information about how they do their work and how they can do it better, I am asking you to forward this to a PM that you know.

As this is the first time we are holding this type of an event, we have priced it below our other events at a thrifty $249. As of January 15th the price will increase to $295. If you have 2008 education budget left you can take advantage of the current event sale that will give you an additional %15 off until 2009! What a deal!

Register today!

This past January, Peter Merholz was talking with Allan Chochinov from Core77 about whether Adaptive Path was interested in joining a new movement around design and sustainability. Peter then asked the Adaptive Path staff if they thought it made sense for our company, that mostly traffics in bits and pixels, to credibly support green causes. This received little response. I think this was because we hadn’t quite decided, as a company, what being green meant. Sure we cared about the environment: about half of us take transit to work, about a quarter bike, a fairly stingy amount of us (six) drive. Thanks to Robert, our Office Manager, we have instituted an office composting program, we use 100% recycled paper, and so on. We have good intentions, but are we green?

It was at this time that Valerie Casey contacted Adaptive Path about joining the Designers Accord. From their web site:

“The Designers Accord envisions a creative community where the principles of sustainable design are seamlessly integrated into all practice and production.

“Our mission is to catalyze innovation throughout the creative community by collectively building our environmental intelligence. For this cause, we advocate inverting the traditional model of competition, and encourage pooling knowledge so that all may benefit and build on marketable and sustainable solutions. We believe this will lead to greater innovation.
“Our approach for accelerating adoption of sustainability principles in the creative community by:

• Providing a productive public and private way for designers to take action
• Asking all adopters to engage in the conversation about social and environmental impact with every client and customer, and integrate sustainable alternatives in their work
• Creating a global community of peers who openly share passion and ideas around environmental and social innovation
• Building a knowledge-sharing network to share best practices, design methods, resources, and tools through an online platform
• Educating ourselves and the public about the environmental impact of consumption”

Adaptive Path had a spirited discussion about the Designers Accord and what it could mean to our company and our design practices. Did we have the authority to discuss sustainability with our clients? We are champions of good experience design, what would happen if we also raised the banner of sustainability? What would we do if the goals of sustainable design conflicted with good experience design? These were important questions and my colleague, Alexa, blogged it. Nevertheless, with overwhelming support we decided to sign-on to the Accord.

Signing on the the Designers Accord kick started some other initiatives that had been plodding slowly in the background, namely off-setting Adaptive Path’s carbon footprint. But the Designers Accord asks for much more. It asks us to include carbon off-setting language into our contracts with our clients, it asks us to lower our carbon footprint each year, and it asks that we consider how design can produce a more sustainable world.

So is Adaptive Path now an environmental company?

No. We are still driven to help companies create products and services that deliver great experiences that improve people’s lives. But now what we are also looking at design problems through a green lens to see how consideration for the environment affect our solutions. Our consideration for the environment will never supersede our passion for good experience design but it has the potential of promoting secondary design considerations and giving additional heft to arguments for features or capabilities.

I am pleased to announce today, which is Earth Day, that we have not only off-set the 454,455.6 lbs. or roughly 228 tons of carbon generated by our operations and consulting in 2007, but that our Managing Experience 2008 San Francisco conference is our first event that is carbon neutral.

Which brings us back to the original question Allan Chochinov posed to Peter last January, is Adaptive Path green? I would reply not yet, but we are looking forward to learning how to be.

If your interested in learning more about the methodology we used to identify and off-set our carbon footprint you can email me.

Here are some good resources in the meantime:
http://www.designersaccord.org
http://www.carbonfund.org
http://www.treesftf.org