Quick Summary – I recently traveled to Delhi which is about 750 kilometers by train from my university. This journey was to understand and empathize what concerns individuals face, I did a real life intervention by being part of the activities which society is performing instead empathizing in my studio. These 20 days helps me to rethink inclusively understand the user experience process.
The challenge to go into the field and do a ground level study of the small or big problems. The attempt was to empathize within a day and understand the real definition of the problems.
To start with I took three steps to empathize the situation; Observe, Interview, and Analyze.
·Observe: I observed the activity throughout the day to examine the zest of situation and how people are engaging with the activity.
·Interview: this part is very crucial to understand the psychology of the users. What they are thinking of the system, services and products as they are the active stake holders of the situation.
·Analyze: I mapped how much people are involved in the activity and what are the time intervals in which the activity is taking place. Efforts they are making to get involved into the activity.
How empathizing helps
The idea of this 20 Design problems in 20 Days allows me to understand the limitations and constraints of design process which we opt in our studios. This neglects the real definition of the problems and eventually we don’t get real solution. Real empathy can never be extracted by user personas or graphing a mock-up data, it comes with real ground level intervention it comes through people involved. Getting yourself into the situation will itself brings out fortunate solutions.
Getting into their shoes
By going to the place where people are and performing the activity into their societies, into their environment, but not calling them into our studios and doing a research by asking questions to them about their experiences. This will not lead us to authentic data and a real picture of their thoughts. Instead of asking them what they think, we should focus on physically watch how they are making their decisions and simplifying their lifestyle. What decisions they are making? How they are making? To whom or what they are comparing the present scenario? What are the stages of their decisions? And what are the influencing factors which is affecting the thought process.
Jugaad - Everyone is Designer
We humans tries to simplify our everyday problems knowingly unknowingly with some daily hacks which at that point of time or for a time duration works well, solve and ease the efforts we are making. This also includes multiple uses of same product or service in our own ways other than what they are meant for. But it actually works well and solve the problems. Everyone is designer and they tries to simplify their problems by themselves.
The Journey
My journey starts on day 1 when boarded the train. I had documented the current solutions, thought process of individuals, what concerns they are facing, how are they making decisions to a situation and what are the factors which influence them to mold themselves to work streamlined in that environment. The amalgamation of these information the real empathy comes in and validation of the problems shows the real definition of problems. And it starts from Day 1:
DAY 1
While travelling in a train. I was looking at vendor selling tea and coffee.
Human behavior while travelling is such that they want every food/eatables to come at their place instead they go to the vendors and buy stuff.
Suddenly I saw a vendor selling coffee with a wearable coffee machine. This is what fascinates me and interests me to buy coffee. Though coffee wasn’t nice.
This design solution could be solved and intervene in human behavior.
