Transcription

17.2.2

Now, in order to further develop your capability in understanding users, one of the strategy is to engage in
anthropological studies or ethnographic studies. It is really embedding yourself in the ecosystem of your users, looking
and observing your users and then learning from them and then bringing that on the design table.

One fine example that is often used in design is the difference between QWERTY keyboard and AZERTY keyboard.
Now, I personally I'm pretty okay using both AZERTY and QWERTY.

But what I've read is that AZERTY used to be a more efficient keyboard than QWERTY, but QWERTY became the the
dominant logic of the PC industry, especially in the English-speaking world. While AZERTY was not adopted by the PC
world and what studies have shown is that AZERTY is more user-friendly, it's more intuitive compared to QWERTY.

Now, what was the implications? The implications was that there was slight bit more investment in training the human
beings to learn the QWERTY keyboard when it was learnt that AZERTY is more efficient, easy to learn and more
intuitive.

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So, it's important to understand that we have to learn from what the research says and then bring it in practice. A
small mistake can remain ossified structurated for generations and may never change. What is ethnographic research?
Ethnography is a qualitative research method which involves a detailed study of a particular cultural group.

The word ethnography comes from Greek words, ethnos, meaning people and graphene meanings, writing or study.
That is why ethnography is known as cultural writing or studying the people. Ethnography is a type of anthropology
that involves studying people in a particular society or culture by observing them in their natural setting.

Student of ethnography might live in Moscow to gather information what Russian marriage practices are, or they live
in India and see how tribes in the tribal regions of Chhattisgarh live and innovate and survive and organise, or they can
involve studying how all people manage their lifestyle when they get retired? All they can study, how cancer patients
manage pain?

What is pain for a cancer patient? Because we individuals cannot understand it. Or it can involve a study of how digital
tablets are influencing the lifestyle of children? Or it can involve a detailed deep study of how accelerators in emerging
markets creating spaces for innovation?

So, ethnography is just not studying culture in the sociological aspects of culture. It goes beyond that and it is applied
and stretch studying extremely complex, painful, happy situations to understand how the humans are behaving and
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then taxonomise that human behaviour into easy to understand, phrases, words and sentences that can later on be
replicated by other people.

So, as a design as a design thinker, you are partly an ethnographer. You dig yourself deep into your users. Empathise
with your users, learn from your users, value your users, see how they interact with machines, with products, with
designs that you want to work on.

What are their, what are their inhibitions? What drives them? What excites them? What makes them happy? Learn it,
observe it and once you have understood it, you bring that on the design table, share it with your colleagues,
brainstorm and move forward. Now, there is a new field with an ethnography called design anthropology.

Design thinking is the application of anthropological slash ethnographic methods to understand human cultural and
social aspects on usability of products and services. Basically, how you apply ethnography into developing design.
Design ethnography is aimed at understanding the future users of a design such as a certain service, a product, how
the life of an individual goes about using a given product or a service wherever there is a disconnect, where there Is
an element of improvement, you as an ethnographer, learn it, bring it on the design table, design it and launch a new
version or a better version.

Typically, ethnographic methodology would involve multiple stages, but, most importantly, it is about delving into the
into your users. Learn, go to the users, interact with the users, interview users, observe, make notes, taxonomise the
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notes into different categories that are easy to understand, easy to explain, yet represent the complexity that the user
is going through and then bring those elements on the design table. So, you really have to dig into it, observe.

I have an exercise for you. I would like you to study and spend at least one hour understanding the children who
use iPads. So, go out in the field spend at least at leas one hour understanding what a three-year-old doing with a
phone. What is he doing? Try to understand it and try to write down, not don't bring in your judgment, whether it's
right or wrong. That's not what you have to do.

What you have to do is observe what a child a three-year-old is doing with a phone. Is he or she able to open the
phone? Is he or she able to open the app? How many steps is he or she taking to open the app? Just observe it and
write down notes, and you would understand how well user-centric design can be understood by simple exercise like
this.

If you're not comfortable in studying a child operating a mobile phone, I would request you to please observe how
your friends behaving on a restaurant table. So, whenever you go in a restaurant with your friend, lets say 10 friends.
Observe how are they behaving?

Are they using technology? Look at the interaction between social gathering, a technology and a restaurant? How are
these three things interacting with each other? Try to take notes, try to understand it and see, there is a discontinuity.
See, is there a possibility that we can bring in value?

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Now, why I say this is you would be surprised a number of startups that are opening around the world that basically
try to declutter technology from the human beings, because they're trying to precisely answer this question where
humans are not interacting with people with humans, but they're interacting with technology more often than with
people.

So, and how do you get to those empathetic understanding is by observing. So, your exercise is either you study a
three-year-old and see how that child interacts with the technology, how much steps it takes? What all things that
child can do, try to learn it and see.

If that you see a discrepancy or not come with an open mind, not that you need to have a prejudice, don't carry any
prejudice or bias just be open or you go in a restaurant with your friends and see what your friends are doing. Try to
understand it and see if there is a ambiguity and imperfection that you can address, and then we can talk more and
understand each other.

So, there are multiple ways of understanding and contextualising your users. I already discussed with you. You can
look at, although quite controversial, but you can look at race, colour, caste religion, region, country, language,
education, income background, parents background to understand the user from where the user comes from.

It can have an impact on the consumption patterns, the choice of the consumer, relative biases and judgment. Another
example that I often use is to understand your users using Maslow's pyramid of needs or wants.

Now, what it does is that typically people at the lower income of earning focus deeply into focus deeply towards
meeting their basic utilitarian essential needs such as air, water, food, education, clothing, and they have this desire
to move to the next level of the pyramid.

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People who are at the at the second from the bottom level of the pyramid tend to focus on safety needs like having a
decent money, having decent number, decent property, decent health and that's their desire, and they spend their
capital in ensuring that that those needs are met and they always desire to move up and fork and move towards love
and belonging a dimension of the pyramid.

So, when you contextualise the user on self actualisation, esteem, love and belonging, safety needs, physiological
needs, you would realise: a. where the consumer or the clients or the users are and what are their desires? Because
each user wants to move up.

They had the desire to spend to move up, and that desire is the market potential for new innovative products and
services. Those who are right at the top at the self-actualisation, they want art, they want, they would abstract art,
they want literature, they want different senses that gives them pleasure and self-realisation.

While those at the bottom are in the process of moving up and they are willing to spend money to move to the next
level of the Maslow's pyramid.

And what I tell to my students, although you may disagree with me and I'm perfectly fine is that the desire to move
up is a potential where you can offer services and products, and that's your to your users and those users who are in
the process of moving up can be a potential user. So, you really need to understand those users and then develop
products and services for those users.
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You have to really dig down, understand them, an example of this kind would be Bollywood movies. You know if you
look at the Bollywood movies, there are certain Bollywood movies that are made for a certain people who, like a
certain type of cinema, for instance, artistic cinemas. They are not made for masses, they are made for a certain class
or certain type of people.

While then there are, there are mass cinemas which are built for certain type of users, and so you can learn a lot
from Bollywood and the kind of movies that are made in Bollywood and the kind of audience the movies are made.

And then you can ask yourself this question: how are they learning about the users? Well, you have this fine example
of Bollywood which studies the users in detail and then make a product that that caters to the users that they want to
target, whether you like it or not.

I have another exercise for you. I would like you to create a news application for different segments of
Maslow's pyramid. So, think about it. What kind of news application? What kind of news application would someone
at the bottom of Maslow's pyramid would like compared to somewhere at the top of the pyramid?

Will they be liking the same application, or will there be difference in the kind of news they hear? Think about it.
Although, you can be a political in your answer, but think about it, what kind of news people are going to like from
different strata of Maslow's pyramid and just write three or four lines for each strata of the Maslow's pyramid and the
kind of news they would like to read.

Now, that's your exercise. You please spend at least 15 minutes of this exercise. If you do it honestly, you would you
would love what you have learned in this small tiny exercise.

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Moving on. So clearly, when you are engaged in ethnographic research, it is advisable to study the user and
contextualise a user on their background, on their religion, cost, education, income, how much is their spending power,
the country they live in, the region they live in, which city they live in, how far they live from the main city? What the
education of their parents?

Each can have a ramification on the user and the user behaviour. Some other elements are you look at the social order.
So, caste is a social order in India. It is a dominant order in certain parts of India. It's not as dominant in cities. It is
extremely dominant in the hinterlands of India.

The other social order is the difference between the patriarchy, the patriarchy and the matriarchy, practices of Indian
society. So, typically, in a patriarchal systems in India, we see greater power concentration in the men of the family
than in the women and they are the ones who decide what the women would do.

And although, you can have your prejudice and bias. But this is what is the social order and you might want to write it
down in order to better understand your user. The power order.

So, if you're studying an organisation, clearly, the top of the organisation would have higher power and higher
influence than someone who is a newly incubated inside the company and clearly the behaviour of an individual,
although for a same product or service, could be different and moderated mediated by the power order.

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Same goes with routines. People in certain routines tend to have a certain specific behaviour than those who are
outside the routine. So, for instance, a priest has a routine in a temple. A priest has a routine, but a child who is going
to the temple once in three months might have a different way of approaching the deities inside the temple. So, a
routine can have a specific impact on the user behaviour.

It's always good to understand the routine and how it impacts the user behaviour. Again, a child interacting with a
machine, may not be a routine activity, while an individual, grown-up, interacting with a machine, could be a routine
activity, and so the user behaviour is certainly moderated slash mediated by the routinisation of the activities and it's
important as a designer to keep that in mind.

There's another field of user studies, which is quite which is now fairly well developed, and it is called netnography.
That is, you study the users on the internet. It is indeed less costly and less time consuming then going in the field and
studying your users.

So, you can go on online communities and interact with the users on online communities to understand what the users
think and how the users behave. It may not be as precise as you going on the field, but it would certainly give you
enough information about the user to think about your users to plan things around your users. What is netnography?

Netnography is a branch of ethnography that analyses the free behaviour of individuals on the internet that uses online
market research techniques to provide useful insights. You really use the online noise of your users and make sense
of it.

You can pretty much use social media, where, for instance, if you want to understand how the user reacted to the
new iPhone launch, you can pretty much tag, you can pretty much hashtag iPhone new launch and see how the users
are reacting to the new iPhone launch and understand it they like it.

If they don't like it or same goes with the with movies nowadays. I mean I was reading that one can guess how good
the Bollywood movie would be based on how the social media is reacting to the Bollywood trailer.

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Like the reaction to the trailer is positive. It is high possibility that the movie would do good and if the trailer is is not
creating buzz in the online community, very highly likely that the movie may not do well. Although it's not always true,
but the correlation is quite high.

So, netnography is certainly coming up very strongly and one needs specialised skill set to understand the users on the
internet. Many people specialising in digital marketing are indeed learning netnography to understand the users online
to collect user data, whatever it is available and incorporate that on in their design.

It is quite hard actually, as the users are learning, as they are realising that they are being used upon by
by netnographers to study. It is getting challenged to get data from them. Nevertheless, it is an exciting field to learn
how to get data online because it is quite cost effective, and it is quite good that can be incorporated to develop new
product and services.

Students, I would request you to please complete two exercises. You have to write a short note on how you would
develop a real estate property that is friendly to the old and retired people. What things you would you keep in mind?
What services would you provide and how would you price it?

Write a one page report on the same. Secondly, I would like you to please collect data from online communities who
love pani puri and create a pan-India brand and QSR services around pani puri. It might look very trivial about pani

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puri, but you'll be surprised the number of number of QSR services that are running on pani puri in Ahmedabad and
Pune, not so much in Delhi where I come from.

So, I would certainly advise you to please study the online communities and come up with some ideas on how you
would create a product, services that can turn a simple pani puri into a QSR restaurant.

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