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.
[ 13] Gaver, W. W., A.
Dunne, E. Pacenti.
“Cultural Probes”
interactions 6, no. 1 (1999):
21-29.
January + February 2009
DOI: 10.1145/1456202.1456209
© 2009 ACM 1072-5220/09/0100 $5.00