Human centered design: Surprising insights from rural Kenya

One of the most surprising things that struck me over the past couple days of running around doing recce visits for our upcoming rural research was just how rapidly and how well the concept of the user centered design (UCD) process and thus, the human centered approach to research and development was not only understood by our rural hosts but how much it was appreciated. As others in the field know, it can often be a challenge to explain to clients why user research is critical and what kind of difference it can make, more so in the former rich world.

Even the local councilor’s political protege beamed when he heard that it was critical to understand ‘his’ people first and their daily life before coming up with any product, service or plan. In fact it makes me wonder whether his little part of the world is in for any changes?

Mind you, we were extremely blessed during our visit to Makueni district – one of the more challenged parts of Kenya, where the arid landscape can suffer from insecurity of such essentials such as food and water.  Our contact there introduced us to his old friend, who was in between contracts, and Rafael (whom I’m sure I’ll be mentioning more in future posts) turned out to be an experienced expert in poverty alleviation programs and a trained anthropologist to boot.  Our initial meeting rapidly turned into a project planning session.

But that’s a welcome side note. I started this post because as we were discussing the methodology and approach that I intended to use for our consumer insights research, I found that not only was the UCD process grasped rapidly by all the others at our table, its value was also appreciated and understood.

As our local businessman friend explained, too often products for their market were simply direct imports or secondhand and shoddy goods “sent to Africa”. The fact that their community’s lifestyle and daily challenges were considered important enough to be understood first before the development of any strategy or device was felt to be a mark of respect.

It makes me ponder whether we do the economically or infrastructurally challenged a disservice to continue to think of them as the BoP – no one, if asked, would ever consider themselves the base or bottom of anything.  And I wonder if that’s why so many of these socially beneficial products or poverty alleviation products and programs fail because to embrace them would imply to one’s peers and community members that one was ‘beyond hope’ or ‘poor’ regardless of one’s one economic challenges?

M-PESA and the service innovation framework (extract)

A former student of mine just mailed me this article “Extracting Key Lessons in Service Innovation” (pdf) by S.Wooder and S. Baker, recently published in the Journal of Product Innovation Management, January 2012 edition. Here is the abstract of the article:

This paper describes how Sagentia—working with Vodafone, Safaricom, and other organizations—played a significant role in the creation and delivery of a landmark mobile money transfer and payment service for emerging markets, starting in Kenya. In this profile we examine the organization aspects and approach that contributed to the success of the service: the lessons we learned as the technology provider and how the experience has informed and strengthened our service innovation processes.

Reading through, what I found most valuable among the basic principles so simply and clearly articulated, was this insightful description of service innovation, as pertaining to the ways that a human centered design innovation team can work to improve the customer experience for any company, large or small:

What Is Service Innovation?  Creating and Delivering Value

We are familiar with service innovation examples such as music download, loyalty programs, franchise chains, ticket/check-in kiosks, and online tax returns.

Service innovation can be described as a combination of technology innovation, business model innovation, social-organizational innovation, and demand innovation, with the objective of improving existing services (incremental innovation), creating new value propositions (offerings), or creating new service systems (radical or transformational innovation) (IfM and IBM, 2008). The key components of service innovation can be distilled down to “participative” value delivery; [...]

So if the service is considered to be:

• something that may or may not entail physical product delivery or consumption
• a value delivery mechanism that connects the enterprise to the customer
• the combination of a value proposition, a delivery mechanism, and a customer’s experience

Then service innovation is simply innovation applied to one or more of the following areas:

• new concepts and/or value propositions
• new delivery mechanisms and/or business models
• new experiences

[...] Successful service or product innovation encompasses progress from the creative act (the so-called fuzzy front end) to the commercialization act (execution) and beyond that to sustainability and evolution of the innovation. Our simple framework for service innovation is shown in Figure 3

 And finally, they share with us the mapping of MPESA on to this service innovation framework.

The authors conclude their informative article with the following words:

Key lessons that were highlighted by our experience with M-PESA include:

• Learning in a detailed sense the needs of users in new markets and ensuring that it is possible to implement these needs and requirements as part of a pilot process;
• “Keeping it simple”; particularly in the early stages of the service, it is important to focus on a small set of compelling, marketable functions and features;
• Ensure that flexibility and agility, the ability to react and to respond to changes in the business model, are designed into the system; and
• For a service to succeed, it requires a critical mass of users as soon as possible; identifying mechanisms to motivate users to take up the service is an important part of the service innovation process.

The results of the study cannot claim to be generally applicable; however, it has allowed the “usefulness” of the conceptual stages in the service innovation framework to be empirically tested in a real-world example, and the vulnerabilities and strengths are better understood as a result.

In conclusion: Lessons from The Village Telco project in Kenya

We’ve finally reached the point in our work for Village Telco where there’s been enough time for some reflection after the intense weeks of travel and observations across Kenya.  I can cluster our learning into three broad areas: our approach, methodology and team work; Kenya’s people and the informal economy; and finally, the role of the mobile phone and the internet across the country.

Facebook
Top of mind, what I would really like to do is take a deeper look at all the factors Why a social networking site like Facebook has become so popular – is it like Mxit, a far more affordable and convenient way to stay in touch with extended social networks or are there reasons beyond the obvious?  Given the variance in socio economic backgrounds and education among all those who were active on this platform, I wonder whether there are learnings of value for the larger goals of what ICT can do to enable social and economic development. Instinctively I feel its not Facebook per se that is the critical factor, like a Mxit in South Africa or an Orkut in Brazil, it simply happened to be there. However, given my approach to increasing understanding of a particular demographic or validating a hypothesis, my first principle is to question my own instinct and subsequent assumptions.

Mobile Phones and the Internet
Our assumptions and inferences from the surplus of information and data available on mobile phone use in Kenya, for both online use as well as regular use, were seriously jolted. You could say we had the veil torn from our eyes.  A future post that has been percolating is one that turns my entire thinking about the Mobile and the BoP upside down, from the point of view of “the mobile as a platform for social and economic development” for the individual.

A big realization was that it was technically impossible for people to go online  – if it wasn’t just  the initial peek at Google or Yahoo or what have you – from their mobile device without visiting a cyber cafe (or using a computer) first. If you are a first time internet user and plan to use the mobile as your primary device to check your email and update your status in Facebook, you are unable – at this moment in time – to create your email account, and subsequently your Facebook page, without the use of the personal computer.

The second was that very few of these new internet users were cognizant of the way mobile operators structure the cost of browsing and data bundles. Safaricom, the country’s largest operator, had at least 3 different prices that I’d seen on their billboards and posters – Ksh 4 per minute if you simply went online, Ksh 2 per minute if you sent an sms for data conversion and finally, purchasing a data bundle or browsing package (unlimited by the day or bundle) which brought the cost down further. Thus many reverted back to browsing at cyber cafes where at least one knew what one’s cost would be or could estimate it in advance. Consumer education will be more critical for the uptake of the mobile internet since it is currently not to the benefit of either the operators or the cyber cafes to inform users about their cheaper options.

Kenya is different
We sensed this, we discussed it with Steve Song and we also heard it from others with years of experience of doing business in Sub Sahara. Kenya, as a representative sample of Sub Sahara or even East Africa, is a very different kettle of fish, all in a good way. It wasn’t just luck that most of the cyber cafe owners we met around the country were enterprising, articulate and opportunistic. Neither was it chance that very rarely was I unable to communicate – at least the basics – in English, no matter where we went.

Internet costs, mobile data and voice costs are significantly lower than in most countries and this factor, taken together with the maturity of the urban cyber cafe market and penetration of computing devices – laptops and desktops – meant that this was a very sophisticated market regionally. One cannot generalize our findings for other countries, in fact one would hesitate to do so. Rather, as we discussed with Steve, we’ll take Kenya as a leading indicator of shifts to come in the near future for the rest of the region. For example, VoIP as a service has atrophied into two or three neighbourhoods ever since international calling rates have stabilized at around Ksh 3 a minute (USD 3 cents or thereabouts) on the other hand, wifi is slowly demonstrating its future ubiquity.

However, some other factors would also play a part in this – literacy is at 85% here; what kind of difference does that make when it comes to uptake and popularity of text based communication mechanisms such Facebook, email and of course, the SMS.  Education makes a difference, since most of the time, even when passing by some of the technically most impoverished parts of the country, I kept feeling that it was in far better shape relative to similar locales in India. This is all good and bodes well for the future of the nation and the region – if I had to launch a wholly new product for the Sub Saharan market, I’d select Kenya for an environment with the lowest barriers to the adoption of innovation. The BoP market is sophisticated and mature while still demonstrating the core values and buyer behaviour seen everywhere else I’ve been.

In conclusion
We now have an innate sense of the Kenyan landscape when it comes to ICT: the technology, the internet and the phone. A gut feel for the where and how and why the diffusion is taking place, outward from the urban metro that is Nairobi and an instinct for the pulse of the country’s progress. The critical role of the cyber cafe was made apparent by the focus of this project and our philosophy and methodology in approaching this problem to be solved – answering Steve’s questions – has been validated and refined. For example, we found that the figure for our estimate for proportional penetration of internet between two regions differed from the Kenya ICT Board’s Access Gap Analysis data only by 0.2

We learnt that no two projects will ever be alike and the only certainty is uncertainty. There are no prepackaged ready made solutions or processes for the challenges we’ll face in our chosen line of work, however we’re on the right path for discovering the ways and means to use the tools available at our disposal in order to best address them.

Today, we’re confident enough to put it in writing that if you’re seeking answers to the unknown, in untapped or overlooked markets and when none of the regular methods and frameworks for addressing your marketing, strategy or design needs seem to work – give us a call or drop us a line. I believe we can help you.

Jua kali jewel

Incandescent bulb kerosene lamp, Kajiodo, Kenya

And old bulb, a cap from a glass jar, some metal strips – light.

Innovation at the small enterprise level

Moses with Muchiri, MtoPanga, Mombasa Oct 10th 2011

I’ve never been left with such a strong sense of enterprise and innovative thinking as I have now after this past week in Coastal Kenya. In fact I asked Muchiri if he’d been specifying some high standards for the introductions made to various cyber cafe owners or was it that we just happened upon the amazing crowd of people that we did.

What blew me away was simply their quality and resourcefulness – Moses for example, shown above talking to Muchiri in his little workspace at the back of his second cyber cafe, was a biochemist by training with a penchant for fine arts. He had a thriving business around creative services – graphic design, screen printing, photo touch ups etc right down printing your choice of photograph onto a ceramic mug for you. This was in addition to his two cyber cafes and computer training classes. He was the first to dismiss mobile phones as the perceived threat to cybers, instead pointing out that it was mobile broadband modems that were having the real impact along with easily available cheap desktops.

The common thread running through the success stories of growing sustainable small businesses seemed to be centered around a willingness to question the limitations of conventional services, spotting opportunities centered around this investment in hardware, software and access and a sense of changing trends observed among their customer base.

Moses' Dibarts ICT Village at Vintage Plaza, Mtopanga, Mombasa

Moses actually mentioned that latter – almost articulating the basic idea of doing user research and incorporating the feedback into his business strategy. He calls it the number of ‘No’s he gets versus the number of ‘Yes’s as one of the drivers for his choice of services to offer.

The ones who felt the slowing down of business were more likely to be those who imagined that simply setting up shop would bring in the cash flow or had let the changes go by passively without responding.  The good old days of customers waiting in a queue for a limited amount of time at the computer have gone for good.  What’s emerging in the frontlines are solutions like Robert‘s in Cannon Towers in downtown Mombasa.

Business centre set up by Robert, Mombasa, Kenya 12 Oct 2011

Noticing that many of his cyber cafe customers were walking in piles of documents they were struggling to manage in the tiny space available in the traditional cyber cafe layout, Robert realized that there was a business opportunity in catering to their needs. The majority of his business came from shipping agents and such like, most of whom would not even be based in Mombasa but in town only long enough to release their goods at the nearby port. He threw out the cramped cubicles and replaced them with spacious work stations – in effect, offering hot desks rentable by the day, week or month by the transient business workers.

Robert's signage on the street level of Cannon Towers, Mombasa, Kenya

Now, with fewer computers he generates more revenue at his business center than he does at his original cyber cafe still operating at a different, yet more high traffic location surrounded by educational institutions. Naturally, he already has his expansion plans in place even as the traditional cyber next door has declining revenues due to market forces.

Opportunity spaces vs ideas – business development for the BoP markets

Inaugural Issue of Entreprenuer magazine, photo taken in Kanpur India, Sept 13, 2009

Ideas or concepts are not the same as opportunity spaces or gaps in a particular market. Exploratory user research can identify opportunities for innovation, that is, either unmet needs or gaps in the existing ecosystem which could be filled by a product or service with the intent to create and provide value. On the other hand, actual ideas for new businesses or concepts for products or services may not be the immediate outcome of such exploration. While the insights from the field can act as waymarkers for new revenue generation opportunities, they are not the actual ideas or concepts themselves.

Imho, this conflation of the two – a concept or an idea and an opportunity space or gap in the existing market – gives rise to confusion about the goals or outcomes from field research, particularly in the short term or for the immediate results. It must be noted that even insights derived from observations are usually the result of data analysis and synthesis, best done with a team after the field research has been completed. Only after this can one say with any degree of confidence which gaps or behaviours observed would translate into potential opportunity spaces for innovation or new product development leading to sustainable and sustained revenue generation opportunities. Finally, the concepts or ideas can be generated within the constraints of this opportunity space.

The potential ‘market’ at the BoP is vast, complex and chaotic and too many needs go unmet that at first glance that it may seem opportunities are indeed available  for the picking and the possibility of fortunes immense.

The first critical challenge is to evaluate which of these potential areas offer value; a return on the customer’s investment, meagre though it may be.

The next is to evaluate the time and effort any new venture among BoP customers would require before it would start showing returns.

This is not a hit and run market.

Raising some concerns about urban user research insights being applied to design for rural markets

So, how exactly do you make this thing work again? (Jan 2009)

The Rural Market Insight Group at the Centre for Development Finance (CDF) conducted a six-week product test with a Base-of-the-Pyramid (BoP) household in Chennai, Tamil Nadu. The purpose was to explore whether urban user testing of rural-targeted BoP products yields relevant user insights in early design stages. Surprising results warrant further research of this potentially valuable technique.

It was with great interest that I browsed through the results of the CDF’s research conducted for a newly designed cook stove.  Their rationale for evaluating the applicability of their research results across the urban/rural divide was framed thus:

However, extensive rural user testing that would provide the necessary design insights is demanding for companies with limited time and budgets, looking to scale up quickly. Companies must locate rural test sites, target households willing to test and provide user feedback, make multiple site visits to collect data and analyse insights, modify prototypes and repeat the process several times in several locations.

A valid point. Particularly when the BoP market’s pricing requires minimizing sunk costs during the R&D phase.  The research team then tests the user testing process/methodology with an urban BoP user who shares many similarities with her rural cousins in her kitchen. Their findings include:

 While it will always be necessary to conduct BoP product testing with a rural target audience, urban testing can alleviate financial and logistical challenges that researchers face when conducting early-stage usability and design testing on BoP consumer energy products. Urban spaces offer high densities of BoP-product users, many of whom retain rural behaviours. Close proximity to potential testers allows for low-cost, high-contact interaction with testers and continuous tracking of user behaviours that would go unnoticed with less contact.

So why should there be any reason for concern? The team emphasizes the need to put the user at the center of the design process and articulates the challenges and limitations well.

Timing, context and relevance

The success of these findings should not imply that that understanding user behaviour among urban migrants from rural regions offer actionable insights for rural BoP users in their own environments.  User testing is not the same thing as user research, and certainly not exploratory or applied user research of the kind implemented to identify  opportunities or develop new market strategies.

What is the difference between user testing and user research as applied to the context of the user centered design process?

From Josh Walsh’s link:  Simply put, the biggest difference is when they are used in the process.

Here, a product that has already been designed and prototyped is being tested in the field [implementation] in order to apply the findings to refine the design of the particular prototype. The basic idea or concept for a product emerges from the insights which are based on the initial user research (immersion) – the findings from prototype testing offer insights for improving an existing design but by this stage, but  will not answer the question of whether the basic design was appropriate for the user’s environment in the first place.

And if these research findings are also to be used to offer affordable and relevant products, then the financial behaviour as well as access to and affordability of the relevant fuel will change significantly between the urban and rural environments.

From the researchers’ own document:

The Quality of User Experience – Alben 1996
The UCD concept is based on questions about user experience with the product:

1. Does the user understand how to use the product?
2. How does the user feel while using the product?
3. Does the product serve its purpose?
4. How well does the product fit into the user’s environment?

Cost, Convenience and Caution

Refining an already designed prototype can certainly be done conveniently and cheaply nearby, however initial concept development and design strategy should not be assumed to rely on the same findings.

Another grey area of confusion emerges from the UCD process popularized in the development of softwares and websites, being conflated with the human centered design approach when it is implemented for industrial design of tangible artifacts that are manufactured with materials and resources.  It is far easier and cheaper to tweak a prototype for user interfaces or software applications and then test it with the users, after requirements gathering, than to change the basic engineering or mechanical aspects of a product’s design even in the prototype phase, once the concept has been developed.

Therefore, it is far more important to get the initial research done correctly among the target audience for actionable insights that lead to concepts and design criteria before the product is designed or prototypes are even built and test.  In the long run, that saves far more time and effort, not to mention costs, than attempting changes much later in the product development path. It is where major commitments are typically made involving time, money, and the product’s nature, thus setting the course for the entire project and final end product.

Here is a snippet on the role of User research or User centered research and the when and why  during the product design and development process:

User-centered research is regarded as an integral part of the design and development process. To most, UCR is presented as an essential component of how concepts are conceived, developed and tested in contemporary design. It is involved in all parts of the design process used to best address user needs and expectations. This entails using the research during early phases to identify new design opportunities as well as testing concepts during later development and postproduction phases. As such, the UCR is defined as a tool for  generating new opportunities as well as evaluating concepts in development.

Value for money and a return on investment

There are far too many well designed products for improving the lives of those at the Base of Pyramid that have never quite managed to achieve their goals than those that have succeeded.  Understanding the variety of powerful tools design makes available for observing our potential audience, their needs and their environment and knowing when to apply what and why can often save far more time, effort and money in the long run while improving the chances of success for the new product introduced.

Insights from the South African low income market (BoP) opportunity

Durban, South Africa - Jan 2008

I came across this article from South Africa titled “Why companies should care about the low-income market” which has some excellent insights about this demographic and opportunity space. Also called the ‘BoP or Bottom of the Pyramid’, it is the mass majority segment in the emerging middle class in Sub Sahara today (per recent reports.) I’ve interspersed my observations in between snippets from the article which are in italics:

He notes that large firms are also becoming more secretive about their bottom of the pyramid (BoP) strategies, perhaps a sign that they are beginning to take this market seriously. “We see a very clear trend that companies are no longer asking what the bottom of the pyramid is.”

This is an interesting piece of news – BoP markets are now internationally recognized as a long term growth market opportunity,  the secrecy implying that the strategy is less about CSR (and attendant goodwill via PR ) and more about competition.

 ”If you look at the upper-income segment in South Africa, those markets are mature, they are growing at perhaps 1% to 2% per year, whereas your low-income segments are growing at anything between 9% and 15% per year. You ignore such trends at your peril,” Coetzer explains.

Here’s why companies are taking it seriously – those are some significant growth figures, offering the kind of returns on investment that saturated, mature markets cannot.

Another point here is that BoP customers are very rarely formally employed with a regular paycheck.  The BoP market is also mostly cash based and almost 70% of the lower income markets are rural. All of these mean that they have not felt the impact of the global recession (there are exceptions such as migrant worker remittances from the rich world for example).

The article gives an example of tapping into REculture – the informal market’s characteristic behaviours of recycle, reuse, repurpose, resell and repair.

Coetzer explains that bottom of the pyramid strategies do not always just comprise of selling products, but also purchasing from the low-income segment. An example of this is Collect-a-Can, a non-profit but self sustaining recycling business, with steel and tinplate producer ArcelorMittal and beverage can manufacturer Nampak as shareholders. Collect-a-Can pays people cash for collecting used beverage cans and provides tens of thousands of unemployed South Africans with the opportunity to earn a living.

Opportunity spaces

“immediate untapped opportunities are present in the fields of financial services (especially mobile money), home upgrading and repairs (plastering, tiling, electrical installations, insulation, energy‐saving light bulbs, solar panels) as well as the distribution and delivery of goods. ”

An earlier survey [...] revealed that the majority of informal entrepreneurs in Cape Town townships are looking to grow their businesses, but are unable to do so because the type of credit, insurance, training and financial services available in the formal market are not adapted to their needs.

Catering for the low-income segment often calls for creative business models and product innovation.

While these unmet needs are the most visible, increasing competition will require a more strategic, customer-centric approach beginning with a greater understanding of this customer demographic.  Opportunity spaces for new products and services that can add value and enhance lives,  not simply plug the gaps of unmet needs. Needs and wants are so many at the BoP that every decision to spend money is a trade off on the risks of a return of maximum value.

“There is huge diversity within the bottom of the pyramid. People have different aspirations, different needs, and one of the biggest mistakes for any company would be to think of it as a single market segment. Not bothering to investigate just how diverse this segment is, is something we see quite often as a classical mistake,” says Coetzer.

 

Further reading

Emerging Markets as a Source of Disruptive Innovation: 5 Case Studies – February 2010
The 5D’s of BoP Marketing: Touchpoints for a holistic, human-centered strategy – January 2009
The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid Begins with Understanding : Targeting the BoP Customer (PDF) – Nov 2008
Design for the Next Billion Customers  – April 2008

Invention vs Innovation from the customer’s perspective

 

 

An invention is not an innovation until it is adopted by the users ~ John Heskett

 

We think that technology has all the answers or can provide that magic silver bullet.  If we can simply build that shiny, new widget or make an app for the service, customers are bound to flock to the latest, greatest thing.  But as many have found, it doesn’t quite work that way.

John Heskett, who recently retired as the Chair Professor of Design at Hong Kong Polytechnic University, taught a course I took at the Institute of Design, IIT Chicago called ‘Design planning and market forces’.  The  sentence I’ve quoted above is my best paraphrase of his explanation of the difference between an invention (or technological advancement) and an innovation, from the end user or customer’s point of view.

The Segway, he said,  is a great example of advanced technology. The iPod has often said to be nothing more than pulling together numerous existing technologies into a beautiful package.  Which of these has been enthusiastically adopted by people (users) around the world?

One of these managed to change the way people listen to music, how they purchase it, store it and share it. The other could have changed the way people moved. One was considered a major innovation. The other remained an invention, albeit a major one.

Innovation does not simply have to be just a cool new product alone.  iTunes was the accompanying service (and business model with an attractive payment plan) without which the iPod may have remained a very beautiful flash drive with speakers.

This is why we emphasize the need to understand the people before focusing on the technology and take a customer centric approach to innovation.

 

Going solar as mainstream consumer choice

Supermarket solar display, Nairobi, Kenya June 2011

This shelf of alternate power supply equipment displayed in a Nairobi department store caught my eye.  It was in the consumer product section along with fridges, washing machines, TVs and a host of small appliances.  It was the first time I’d seen such a wide variety – batteries, solar panels, lamps – so casually displayed and in such a context.

Sunlite solar light, Nakumatt, Nairobi Kenya

Diesel generators and inverters are more common in India and certainly not displayed along with other white goods for direct consumer purchase. Seems like solar power is a mainstream consumer choice in the Kenyan market and worth exploring further.