PATH is an international, nonprofit organization that creates sustainable, culturally relevant solutions, enabling communities worldwide to break longstanding cycles of poor health. By collaborating with diverse public and private-sector partners, PATH helps provide appropriate health technologies and vital strategies that change the way people think and act. With headquarters in Seattle, USA, PATH has 28 offices in 18 countries and is funded by private foundations, the U.S. and foreign governments, multilateral agencies, corporations, and individuals.

Quicksand was commissioned by PATH, Seattle to conduct an Extended User Testing (EUT) study (funded in turn by Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation under the Safe Water Project), over ten months – between March to December 2009 – across rural, peri-urban and urban settlements in Andhra Pradesh, India. The purpose of the EUT Study was to inform the Safe Water Project team at PATH about user experiences that are key to a successful and relevant product strategy for low cost household water treatment and storage (HWTS) products targeted at base of the pyramid markets. By studying how participants interacted with and used selected products in their home over 6 months, Quicksand helped the Safe Water Project team in integrating these findings into product commercialization and product design.

Quicksand was subsequently brought in to lead the product development phase to convert the research findings into tangible proof-of-concepts for a low cost, gravity fed, multi-stage water treatment device. The project involved collaboration between Quicksand, as industrial design and user experience experts, and engineering, manufacturing and project management teams based in Seattle. More detailed description on the new product development activity can be found in a follow-up post titled “Product Innovation for Base of Pyramid”.

Extended User Testing

As part of the User Experience (UX) study, five commercially available, multi stage gravity filters were placed in 20 low-income households as surrogates to understand users’ expectations and interactions with HWTS products.

The Quicksand study team employed a wide variety of UX research methods to document the everyday lives of users and understand the usage of these filters as time progressed. The methods used were:

• Video ethnography & shadowing sessions (by following users at work and home over several days)
• In-depth and in-context interviews and discussions with household and community members
• Role plays
• Participatory design workshops (focus groups and co-design workshops)
• Feature preference exercises (to elicit users’ aesthetic preferences, comparative evaluation of products & hypothesized responses to scenarios)
• Self administered probes (through disposable cameras handed out to participants)

The key stages of the study were as follows:

• Location reconnaissance (March 2009) to understand the use context and identify suitable locations for the research. The locations were selected on the basis of water availability or scarcity in that region, water quality, incidence of water related problems and the economic status of residents of that region.
• Establishing the baseline context (April 2009) with respect to the water ecosystems (water sources, public utilities and government or civil society interventions if any), individual awareness and adoption of water treatment practices, consumer behavior towards durable products and their lifestyle aspirations and ambitions.
• Product placement (May 2009) of selected water filters in each household and observing initial interactions of users with the products, device setup, assembly & problems faced therein.
• Codesign workshops (June 2009) to involve potential users in creating their ideal filter concepts.
• Revisiting households (July-September 2009) to study changes in use behavior, product breakdowns, adaptations & user workarounds after one, two, four and six months of product use.
• Assimilating research findings into top level insights, product concepts & systems (October-November 2009) to help extended teams understand implications of observed user behavior and to kick-start preliminary product development
• Detailed synthesis and documentation (January 2010) to create report formats that make the study findings accessible to a larger community of commercial partners, academics, public health experts and health practitioners. The deliverables consisted of a narrative report formatted in web and print medium.

While the EUT study conducted by Quicksand provided critical findings & recommendations that facilitated a holistic HWTS product strategy for BoP markets, it also provided a framework for an insightful process of research and design pertinent to product development for low-income populations.

Film on Codesign Workshop

Product Placement Observations

Film on product placement

As part of the Ripple Effect project in India, IDEO identified 5 organizations working in the domain of safe water and provided them incubation support in the areas of business and design to develop solutions such as delivery services and large-scale community water storage systems.

Quicksand was approached to document the journey of these five organizations, spread over different corners of the country, as they went about prototyping and deploying their solutions. The film based documentation became an important medium for IDEO & Acumen Fund to demonstrate the value of design thinking in driving issues pertaining to social development and impact.

The film is now in public domain and can be viewed here:

The survey recorded the feedback from about 30 subjects across New Delhi between July 2 – July 3, 2008. This data represents people from varied walks of life and demonstrates that the discerning consumer is not just the well-educated city dweller but is as much the “pan-wallah” around the curb or the migrant worker. A copy of this rich media survey is uploaded here (3.4 mb, 57 pages) and may be used with due credits.

The research questions we have addressed include the basic demographics of the respondent i.e. the person’s name, age and profession. The other set of questions are either around the mobile device they own or the telecom service provider they are subscribed to. The opportunities for innovation are typically hidden within the responses and behavior of people and these are just two facets we thought were worth
exploring.

The survey is a snapshot of the diversity of telecom users in our cities, reinforcing a few things that we must bear in mind as either a new entrant or an existing service provider in this space:

• the prevalence of mobile phone as a communication device cuts through all sections of society and therefore the same product ends up delivering almost as many unique experiences as there are consumers
• the power of social media, particularly for the uninitiated consumer, is the most defining influence on the choices they make
• the service that differentiates one provider from the other is almost non-existent and more starkly so when the consumer demands are as basic as they come

This document intends to trigger a dialogue on service design & innovation and re-focus the efforts on the wellspring of a great brand & service – the consumer. Also uploaded is short film we made of some interesting and leading user reactions.

Quicksand has been working with IDEO since early 2006, managing and facilitating design research for them in India. Services rendered include:

• research planning & design
• ethnographic research
• cultural guiding
• rich media documentation
• data synthesis

Research formats range from shadowing sessions to fly-on-the-wall observations, diads, contextual inquiries, group sessions and usually involve a combined IDEO-Quicksand team in-field. The domains of intervention have cut across products and services in sectors such as internet, mobile and telecommunications.

(project details with-held as falling under an NDA)

A small stop motion film (below) and a downloadable pdf (127 pgs, 18mb) summarise the use of film & photography in documenting design contexts.

Here’s the link

It gets mentioned in the first story, first paragraph

“…Here’s one especially striking comment from a clip she shows of cell phone user research. It’s shot in India, where a woman opens a window in her house by rolling up a plastic tarp on her tent: “We can miss a meal a day, but we cannot miss a day on our mobile phones. It will affect all our work and our lives.”

Click here for more information on the Serious Play conference.

Quicksand was brought in as the design research team to evaluate the unique aspects of Indian education, including constraints on rural schools, teachers, children, parents and infrastructure. The research in turn led to design recommendations on:

• Suitable collaboration platforms between various stakeholders
• Concepts for content delivery, interaction and system interfaces at each consumer touch point for phase one of program implementation
• A future blueprint of the program with respect to new technology & human interventions
• Internal & external communication necessary for system roll out
• Tweak existing user interface making it relevant for the new context of education

Following are some design & research artifacts from the project.

The program was piloted at district Bardhman, four hours from Calcutta. A week long ethnographic research established some key personas, concerns and paradigms that would govern the design of the Education Helpline. The work consisted of observational studies, in-depth interviews, group discussions as well as photo and film documentation – all aimed at moving towards a richer understanding of the current context.

A short film on teachers sharing their concerns and opinion on the existing education paradigm

Synthesis of the research data led to preliminary identification of user concerns, which provided an indication of the level of complexity that would be demanded of the system. Some key findings are shown below:

The next stage of the study involved developing interaction concepts that were tested with users to establish:

• Program positioning
• Training & Capacity building amongst stakeholders
• Usability of existing interface
• Database management & build-up

SCENARIO DEVELOPMENT: Illustrations of possible scenarios from point of view of teachers, field workers and knowledge workers

CALL FLOW SCHEMATIC: An illustrated depiction of how a call generated travels through the system and the key stakeholders at each stage.

SYSTEM SCOPING: Feature specification of the system in its short, medium and long term manifest

Finally, the Quicksand design team did an audit of the existing web based user interface, navigation and database structure and made simple visual design changes that would enhance its usability. This was important from the point of view of pilot implementation and was used to brief the technology development team.

Spandana has continued to successfully manage growth. Its gross loan portfolio stands at close to Rs. 300 crores, and has a client base that represents more than 800,000 households. This is estimated at constituting almost 1.5% of the BPL population of India.

The strength of Spandana has been in managing growth and profitability in a sector that has largely been under-serviced. As a result, the domains of intervention for Spandana are not limited to financial services. With ambitions of being the foremost service provider for its clients, Spandana was faced with a challenge to

• leverage its core strengths from the micro finance experience and become an enabler of services that were so far unavailable to this segment
• within the financial services sector, transform from an NBFC (non banking financial corporation) to a mainstream Bank with more robust & diverse service capabilities
• invite equity participation from foreign investors to give momentum to the above two goals

Quicksand was approached with the challenge of re-visioning the Spandana brand and articulating the new identity of the organisation to all interested stakeholders.

It involved, foremost, for the design team to understand the brand and all interfaces that it had with its customers. The attempt was also to uncover stories that would be inspirational and become the guiding beacon for designing the new face of the organisation.

Quicksand embarked on a design research exercise that involved:

• visioning workshops with the top management & CEO of Spandana, Mrs.Padmaja Reddy
• contextual research with Spandana’s customers, experiencing the micro-lending process first hand
• extensive film & photographic documentation of the people, processes and places touched by Spandana

The ensuing design exercise resulted in a new identity, a film and a manifesto for the brand that was unveiled at the largest MFI summit held annually in Canada. Spandana was subsequently also co-invested in by Lok Capital (a micro finance focussed equity fund) & JM Financial.

Click on images below to preview the film & manifesto designed. You may also download the manifesto by clicking here.

The manifesto was printed on recycled paper symbolic of an inspirational story of the founder of Spandana selling discarded newspapers to raise the first corpus of fund for lending. The film was shot at different centers of Spandana while living with the customers & documenting their lives as narrated by them.

The research subjects were inspirational user profiles from the cities of Surat & Mumbai who had unusual & out-of-the-ordinary information needs. Quicksand worked alongside Google’s user experience group from Mountain View, California and their product R&D teams from Bangalore, India.

The research also got cited in a recent conference – Serious Play 2008 (click here to access article)

(project details withheld as falling under an NDA)