Interactions - January/February 2009

create more lasting and valuable products.

There’s a bit of making it up as you go along when you explore unfamiliar socio-cultur-al values, economic conditions, and climate. Only once you’ve started to create relationships and understand your customers can you know how to gather even more comprehensive customer data. In other words, sometimes you have to ask questions in order to know what questions to ask.

The key is to disarm users so they’ll speak candidly and genuinely. Getting people to express their feelings is challenging in most settings— particularly so in cultures in which collective expression is favored over that of individuals. Specialized techniques are often needed. Tools and methodologies, such as HFI’s “Bollywood Method,” can be used by researchers to put the consumer at ease and to assist him in expressing his feelings.

The Bollywood Method gauges the reactions of Indian test users through the use of emotion tickets, an adaptation of the “cultural probes” pioneered by Bill Gaver [ 13]. Specialized methods provide inspirational insights that “reflect” the local culture of participants, cultural probes offer the immediate value of helping users express their emotions in private. Using a familiar cultural form helps facilitate this expression. The Bollywood Method employs rasas from the Indian performing arts—classes of emotions, from “marvelous” to “furious,” at the basis of Indian dance, music, and literature.

The Bollywood Method’s

probes, designed in the form of “emotion tickets” resembling movie tickets, are categorized into the nine rasas, each one expressed in a booklet through images and dialogue from Bollywood films. When interacting with products, customers

record their feelings using the appropriate emotion ticket. They make a note of the service, technology, or product they were using/interacting with when they felt a particular emotion, as well as the reason they felt it. The method greatly simplifies the observation and expression

of emotional reactions and puts a little fun into a sometimes uncomfortable process.

Doing business with the world’s emerging markets requires these kinds of radical innovations in technology, business models, and design technologies.

The challenges facing designers and marketers are exciting, but it is essential they find creative solutions that really work for target users. For corporations, the stakes are greater than expanding their business opportunities. As they drive the shift toward a more sustainable world, enterprises everywhere are touching and improving the lives of people who just a few years ago were not even on their radar.

Learning from their mistakes will unquestionably help designers usher in a new era in design, unlearning what they have been

doing for decades and learning to design new solutions for new users in new markets across a changing globe.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS Apala Lahiri Chavan is the vice president, Asia, for Human Factors International. She is an award-winning designer

(Audi Design Award ’96) who started the new contextual innovation service at HFI. Contextual innovation develops breakthrough product/service concepts that focus on emerging markets. She is learning to become a drummer; and believes she was an anthropologist in her last life.

Douglas Gorney is a graph-
ic designer and the collab-
orative author of five books.
He has also written for
Outside and Moment maga-
zines. After several years in
the software industry, he is today a senior
writer for Human Factors International. He is
also working on a book with one of Silicon
Valley’s leading venture capitalists.

Beena Prabhu is a group lead in HFI’s contextual innovation group in Bangalore, India. She has been working in the consulting field since 1988.

She has experience in design research, conceptualization, project management, project execution, and business development. Before joining HFI, she worked as an architect and engineer in India and in the U.S. for 10 years on various residential, commercial, municipal, and industrial design, and engineering projects.

She has been extensively involved in design research projects that have spanned multiple domains ranging from healthcare, education, retail, and telecommunications to information technology. Her responsibilities at HFI include management of design research projects, business development, and clients.

Sarit Arora is a regional director at HFI. He has more than 10 years of experience in the area of user experience design. At

HFI his responsibilities include design and evaluation of products and software applications, client interaction, understanding user requirements, leading design teams, and teaching user experience design and innovation courses to professionals. He employs contextual innovation methodologies to identify new opportunities and discover users through ethnographic studies to develop breakthrough products and services. He heads the Bangalore, India office of HFI.