Have we missed the boat and are stuck up on the wrong side of the bank?

Hey folks,
I know it has been a loooooooooooooooong time since I have posted anything on this blog and since we have had some good discussions.
I am now posting what I have posted on my personal blog. and would like you guys to add to this thought of mine with your own observations and instances and debate on the question raised. Hoping for another fruitful discussion!

I was part of a team visiting some villages near Mumbai to understand how people with low literacy levels use their mobile phones in day to day life. We were specifically there to understand how they do ‘save’ the contact details of their friends and families and we were in for some surprise. Of course, we did expect that they would keep a physical diary or notebook around them to write down the contacts as we do come across people using this model fairly frequently. But we came across some instances where people used some really interesting ways to beat the problems that the current phone models posed for low literacy and different language skills. For instance, there was this one person, who had saved a four digit number in place of his friend’s name along with his phone number. It turned out that in his circle of friends only one guy owned a motorbike and as it was easier for the person to type number than the alphabets in his phone, he saved his friends contact number under this unique vehicle number! While some of them asked their more educated friends to save their numbers in the phone, one plumber used the missed call list along with the last 5 digits of the phone number to manage his current clients.

Then there was this other time, when coming back from a long trip, my parents and I took a coffee break in a small town. There was a political rally in that town and the restaurant was full of people with some ‘political connection.’ A particular loud mouth was sitting just behind me and my mom and was shouting in his phone trying to give directions to the guy on the other end, which irritated my mom and I had to give him some piece of my mind. But then the situation was deftly and diplomatically handled by my parents to avoid me getting beaten up by the three thugs. This incident made me think, why we shout on the phone when the other person is not able to hear us, as it doesn’t matter how much we shout, it all depends on the network strength! I feel we really don’t realize that the voice quality over the phone is network dependent and behave as we would behave when talking face to face – if you are not audible speak loudly. Actually, instead of blaming the people that they are not ‘mobile-literate’ we should blame ourselves – the designers and developers who develop these technologies, which give not much of an idea of how they work to the people who use it and which are not tuned to the people’s everyday environment of use, like other objects.

There was this other instance when I was trying to design a sandwich cart for a street side vendor, when I came across some very interesting facts of their daily life. Each sandwich vendor had an impression that if they can give out an ‘image of selling clean and hygienic food’ they will attract more people; hence they used braded butter and breads (which were used also as an advertising element). Also, their carts, were ‘designed’ and constructed in an ecosystem, which involved the vendor himself, the local carpenter or plumber and the policeman (with the policemen raiding these units every other month, the unit was dirt cheap made of recycled wood from carton boxes, so that they can keep making such stalls). These facts clearly reflect the notion that we human beings are driven by an inherent (meaning which is not taught) sense of enhancing our lives with whatever resources given at hand – ‘jugaadu’.

These observations and some more lead my mind to ponder some very fundamental questions. The first being, are we (the designers, developers, managers, manufacturers) missing the boat and are on wrong side of the bank? When the ‘user’ of the various products that we are going to produce is a productive and resourceful human being, are we considering this fact and exploiting it in the designs? Are we ready to accept that the ‘user’ here is not what we deduce from the ‘requirement gathering’ and ‘user study’ phase but a much more complex person going about her daily life in a very resourceful manner? I feel yes, we have missed the boat and are on the wrong side of a flooded river! The myriad products and gadgets which are heralded by the press as ‘something which will change the way we live’ and which don’t even take off from their research labs, are a testimony to the fact that we are missing something fundamental. And there is something we need to understand in why some of the other products and artifacts have been highly successful in doing so, without that being the intent of the designers or developers – like the internet or the sms!

Well these questions and the one mentioned in my research motivations are what I am going to attempt to answer. The first thing would of course be to see if anyone has been asking some similar questions and what answers they have found. Well, there are some real good people doing this and soon I will follow up this piece with some of my insights into what others have been doing with the same question.

I will also keep putting up some more interesting observations that I have come across or will come across regarding the day to day life of human beings.