1 of 8

EMPATHY IS NOT ENOUGH

Framing Design Problems in Emerging Markets

By Hannah Wei @herlifeinpixels

Talk originally given at World IA Day Vancouver, Feb 2017

Hannah Wei || https://www.linkedin.com/in/hannah-wei

I live with, and design for global communities. Often on the road for 6+ months at a time, my work focuses on designing products and processes for trust. I help run a community of 400 diverse remote workers at SheNomads.com and sit on the board at KLINK Coffee, a social enterprise helping ex-prisoners re-integrate back into the workforce. In a past life in tech, I was a design co-founder at vizualize.me, and design for clients like Facebook and MIT Media Lab.

---

The case study presented in this talk is a mobile product developed in Africa aimed to help families make food deliveries in urban and suburban homes, where buying power has increased over the years, people have families in town, but transportation infrastructure doesn’t allow groceries to be readily accessible to communities.

I’d like to share my methodology in building trust asking the right questions and designing for context.

Hi-fi prototype for group delivery, assisted by a chatbot: https://marvelapp.com/5bcihi7/

2 of 8

What’s Wrong with Empathy?

But first, a word about empathy.

Empathy is often regarded as a core trait of a good designer.

However, empathy is a tool to understand what another person feels on an individual level, but to design for populations who are not like your own, it is important to understand forces at play that affect how people behave collectively in their environment. Research has shown that empathy backfires in the presence of unconscious prejudice. Paul Bloom makes a great case for this in his book Against Empathy:

”I’m likely to feel empathy toward you, a handsome white guy, but somebody who is repulsive or frightening I don’t feel empathy for. I actually feel a lot less empathy for people who aren’t in my culture, who don’t share my skin color, who don’t share my language. This is a terrible fact of human nature, and it operates at a subconscious level, but we know that it happens.”

Problem solvers trained from the western hemisphere often operate from solutionist mindset. When entering a problem-space, they will intuitively think of themselves as saviours of the people/users. This often ‘other’s the people we are trying to help while centering our own perspectives. However empathetic and well intended designers may be in this case, it is counterproductive to the greater goal of understanding and solving the problems in a population unlike one’s own.

3 of 8

3 Ways to to understand your customer's’ world:

How Is information shared?
How is trust generated?
What enforces your belonging in a tribe?

My methodology involves digging deep into context with people and cultural systems I interact with. and learning how and why they operate holistically from the inside. A lot of user-research methods developed in the west tend focus on asking questions and dissecting individual behaviours in objective situations. This is ineffective in learning how a technology thrives in cultures where people value collectivism over individualism.

Here’s an example of collectivist behaviour: The eagerness and speed at which one commits to a piece of technology in China, parts of Africa, is likely decided by who they trust, what social status they hold, and who is looking behind their shoulder at their screens.

So we look at three major themes that are important to the success of these technologies like WeChat(China), M-PESA(Sub Saharan Africa), and Line(Japan and South East Asia): shareability, trustworthiness, and social credit, to gather context around these by observing and interacting within the community.

4 of 8

Contextual landmarks vs. Specific addresses

How is Information Shared when...

Navigating in Zambia

Word of mouth storytelling vs. Following instructions

Questions for Digging Deeper:

How do people in this community communicate new information to one another? How do they use existing technology to do so?

Add as many locals to the messaging app of choice and observe usage patterns. (Many Zambians prefer to call over text, whereas Thais love to share news and links over text)
Test out scenarios by asking locals to show you what they do when presented with a piece of information that they need to share with someone else. Where do they share it, how do they share it, how urgently, how accurately?

Insight:

On my first day in Zambia I asked a local Zambian to type in on Google Maps the nearest store to get a SIM card. He picked up my iPhone and squinted at the screen, after a few seconds, he handed the phone back to me and began telling me how to get to the mall. He waved his hands and made shapes in the air to describe directions and landmarks. And surely, they were exactly like he said when I navigated to the store.

In many non-western cultures, streets are unmarked and addresses are inaccurate (finding your Airbnb is often a very frustrating process). The locals do not rely on maps to navigate, instead, they use landmarks and verbal instructions. When I asked Zambian drivers to go to locations, it’s not unusual to string together 5-10 landmarks, and be able to navigate to a place they’ve never been to on the other side of town. Folks have sharp visual-spatial memory and awareness, unlike westerners who depend on precision in the written form.

Product Decisions:

Instead of a Google Maps interface that asked the user to enter an address, we tested out a solution that involves

1. GPS scan to determine neighborhood (due to weather and poor connectivity, GPS isn’t reliable enough to determine exact location)

2. User-powered navigation in the form of conversational interfaces to hone in on a delivery drop-off time/point.

5 of 8

Trust in community vs. Trust in institutions

2. How Trust is Generated and Perpetuated when...

Buying and Selling Electricity

Questions for Digging Deeper:

What social/political forces are at play that drive people to use something new? (Ie. your technology) Even before we consider user experience, what is the experience in driving someone away from an existing solution onto a new one? What are the motivating factors that establish trust? Is there a threshold point of mistrust/trust? If so, what causes that threshold?

Insight:

While I was in Zambia’s biggest technology hub interviewing users on the app’s checkout flow, I spotted this machine in the kitchen that belonged to the office’s cook, Aunty Grace. Note that Aunty Grace belongs to a different social class than the rest of the hub workers, and has a lower literacy rate.

Kazang is a successful domestic company offering a distributed mobile payment system in the form of this stationary phone. It runs on a regular sim card. The technology enables Zambian citizens to pay for anything from airtime to their home insurance to electricity bills without leaving their (sometimes remote) communities. The design of the system solves 3 problems:

Save its partner companies huge infrastructure & resource costs of opening more sales offices.
Enables citizens without advanced education to have a source of income with minimal training.
The system strengthens the community by increasing interdependence between neighbors. In a collectivist society that values the well-being of the whole, this incentivizes all parties to use the system over institutional alternatives (big banks).

When we look at how we decide to commit to products/services in North America, trust is defined by institutional cues, like how well a company did the past year, how many awards it has won, etc. But in many non-western cultures, people’s adoption and engagement is highly contextual to who has already committed to using a system. In the case of Aunty Grace, everyone in the office has already established a trusted relationship with her as a cook. It would be wise to further strengthen their community with a microeconomy.

Product Decisions:

One of the most costly problems in the delivery space is misdelivery and re-scheduling. Existing delivery systems are often not transparent enough, and customers either miss their delivery or don’t prioritize being there. Note from field research: Zambians are not very timely.

Understanding that trust is generated by a sense of community, we can minimize the chance of a misdelivery by sending updates from the driver, and we encourage the customer to respond (“I am heading over quickly”). When the identities of the people who are involved in the system are surfaced, people feel a greater sense of accountability to act on by the well-being of the whole.

6 of 8

3. What Defines Belonging to a Tribe when...

Usability: technology adapts to you

vs.

Upward mobility: you adapt to new technology

Using a an Unfamiliar Interface

Questions for Digging Deeper:

In a community centric society, how does one define belonging with the rest of the tribe. How do individuals increase their social standing? How might your technology purposely, or inadvertently, contribute to this motive? It is not as simple as making something simple.

Insight:

Before traveling to Zambia I was already working on a prototype of the groceries ordering flow, I had stripped down much the design to allow the app to load fast. A few days into the research, I had discovered that my design which prioritized simplicity and speed went against people’s desire to belong (to a more tech savvy crowd) and to impress (those who are less tech savvy). This motivation is deeply rooted in early adopters in emerging societies, and I will explain the reasoning after some examples of behaviours that allowed me to recognized it:

People were really keen to play with the apps I’d been using on my iPhone. I was using Android to test and iPhone for photos and recording.
Even with an obvious broken user flow, people would try for a long time before giving up, and they would blame the internet connection instead of the app, and likely to feel disappointed rather than frustrated.

In a society where the have-its and the have-nots have a much higher disparity in quality of life, what you owned, physically and digitally are things used to quickly establish your place to among others. There is an entire chapter dedicated to this topic in Jan Chipchase’s book: Hidden in Plain Sight.

Thus, it is sometimes in people’s best interests to invest time into adapting to new technology in order to show to their family and peers that they indeed have upward mobility.

Product Decisions:

I made a mistake to strip down the design of the prototype of the app before I went into the field. Unlike the short attention spans that we are dealing with in the western world, people there were much more willing to take their time to learn and adapt, provided that the technology runs relatively smoothly under the hood in low connectivity and scales to smaller phone screens. For the next iteration, we are working on bringing back the Google Material Design UI.

7 of 8

Homie - for each flags: ie. HAS NOT PAID

Name (clickable into Homie profile) [view preference]
Status:

matching, intro, app, move-in prep, filled, moving out - upcoming, moved-out
Move-in date, move-out date
Payment status: Deposit paid, Balance overdue

Rental conditions

Room type, Rent, discount
Assigned cost - ie. pg&e, insurance, wifi.

History filter: all | matches | messages | homie status | $$$

Escalations & Complaints
Match Attempts: Confirmation status, score,
Application status updates

decline reason (surfaced at re-match)

Homie: MI/MO
Pricing changes
Admin Notes

Transfer Out

Move Out --->

Lease edit

Login / password, security questions
HomeShare’s rent to building, margin, discount, effective, deposits
Lease start, lease end (countdown to renewal date)

Group Overview

ID, Building, Unit
Spots [2/3]
Score
Urgent status:

Upcoming moveout?
Deposit unpaid?
Overdue?

Most recent Admin note

Renew

Unit Details edit

Configuration

partition type, floor plan)

Necessities

Parking (1/1)
Storage
Furnishing

communication

Decline

Message Confirmation

Add a note

Deactivate Unit

8 of 8

Feel-Good Empathy

GO TO OTHER PEOPLE’S SPACES.

SIT AT THEIR TABLE.

Thank you!

Find me on Twitter or Medium @herlifeinpixels

Shareability, trustworthiness, and sense of belonging - These are three cultural / contextual attributes I try to uncover with any new technology project in a culture different from what I’m familiar with. There are many more bits and pieces of information, and they are often serendipitous, buried in the nuances of everyday communication and encounters.

Empathy is not enough, it’s often not enough to have feel good design-think meetings with people you are already familiar with. Depending on the project it’s not even enough to invite customers to give feedback out of their context.

So I challenge everyone who is designing for a different audience to invest time and resources to sit at your customer’s (dinner) tables. Be a part of their conversations, and understand their systems and processes from the inside. This is where I believe insights emerge to drive important decisions that ultimately deliver inherently sustainable solutions to our’s and others’ communities.

Thank you.

------

About Hannah

Since 2015 I’ve been traveling and living in communities across Asia, and working on digital and product strategy to help strengthen communities in bridging the technical divide. I’m a designer raised by computer scientists, a sometimes photographer and a wannabe anthropologist. I write at: http://medium.com/@herlifeinpixels