The [Human] Codebreakers
What every company gets wrong about developing for the emerging world, and how to do it right.
By Jessi Hempel
Aug 8 2016
<https://backchannel.com/the-human-codebreakers-ddb4ca9b2dff>
Fifteen minutes before Lauren Serota’s Lufthansa flight landed in Riyadh, the female passengers stood and moved to the bathroom. Most had been wearing Western clothes — jeans, blouses, and gold jewelry. They returned in black abayas and head scarves (hijabs), some wearing face coverings (niqabs). The context switch was dramatic and immediate. Serota pulled her own hijab up over her head as the plane hit the tarmac, and she resolved to pay attention.
This was her first visit to Saudi Arabia. On the ground, she met up with Jan Chipchase, her partner on an immersive 21-day assignment to figure out how Saudi youth relate to their phones. Serota, 32, and Chipchase, 46, are both designers with Studio D, a consultancy Chipchase launched in 2014. They had been hired by Saudi Telecom Company (STC), which planned to launch a new brand to target Saudi youth. But first, it had to figure out what Saudi youth might want.
There are as many approaches to market research as there are markets to research, but in the past decade, the type of human-centered design research that Studio D practices has grown increasingly popular. For many large companies attempting to seed new businesses, it has become synonymous with listening to customers. It’s a method Chipchase deserves some credit for helping create. Well before design had entered the lexicon of most business schools, he was, as principal scientist of Nokia Research, documenting the way people used their cell phones in remote parts of Africa and Asia. Former Frog Design president Doreen Lorenzo calls him “the Indiana Jones” of research. He has written three books on the topic, with titles like Hidden Within Plain Sight and the forthcoming The Field Study Handbook.
The trouble is, Chipchase thinks many companies approach research all wrong. He believes the problem lies in their intent: Instead of entering new markets with an open mind, they approach with a strategy in place and then look for the people who prove their theories right. “The only thing worse than not asking the questions, is not paying attention to the answers that don’t fit into their world view, because it’s inconvenient,” says Chipchase.
I’ve known Chipchase for close to a decade, and we started talking about this regularly last January, when I was writing about Facebook’s efforts to get more people online through Internet.org. Facebook had launched a Free Basics service in India that provided free access to a select number of apps. Indian activists accused the social network of violating net neutrality by giving preference to those appmakers. As the debate escalated over the course of 2015, Mark Zuckerberg took a direct stance, publishing a Times of India op-ed in which he wrote about a farmer named Ganesh, who used Free Basics to look up weather information and commodity prices and was able to get better deals. Instead of appeasing critics, Zuckerberg’s opinion fueled the growing backlash. In February, in a big setback to Internet.org, India’s telecom regulator blocked the service altogether.
Chipchase calls Facebook’s flop in India “a watershed moment” for large Western companies trying to launch products and services in the emerging world. He criticizes Facebook for relying on the Ganesh example in its strategic communications on why Free Basics should exist, while at the same time not listening to the Indians who were online, voicing their opinions. Says Chipchase, “Organizations love to talk about bringing the user’s voice into the conversation, yet if it’s just to retrofit an existing growth strategy, it’s morally bankrupt, and in a connected society, a very poor strategy.”
What does it really mean to listen to the people who will use the technology you develop? Chipchase thinks that design research practiced correctly can offer some answers. Six months after our discussion, he got in touch to show me the research he’d just finished in Saudi Arabia, which he’d conduct with Serota. He believes it offers a powerful counterexample: they embarked upon their assignment with broad questions. The insights they gleaned are instructive, but the methods they used to conduct their research are even more so.
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