For More Inclusive Products and Solutions
When designing products or experiences for customers who might be less privileged compared to you, a lot of people attempt to try and think of what life might be like for them in general, and specifically about how they work around the challenge statement. And often, they do this from meeting rooms and offices, well removed from actual users.
While you should ideally be interacting with real users to better understand the challenge you are trying to solve for them, for whatever reason it is not possible to spend time interacting with them, rather than imagine what life and that life around that challenge might be for them, try to think of how someone privileged like yourself might want and expe23t from whatever solution or solution direction you are working on.
End of the day, humans have basic expectations that often unfortunately go unnoticed to people higher up the economic or some other strata. So the least we can do in the absence of real user inputs, is at least consider a respectable minimum must-have’s. Don’t try to skim on the basics, expecting a user who might be less privileged than you, to be thrilled with your solution.
What might that look like?
Think of when Mr. Ratan Tata first proposed (and promised) a car for the masses that would be priced at INR 1 lakh. Media and others got creative, trying to imagine what such a car might look like. Some concepts showed what appeared to be a bare-bones structure, some looked like vegetable carts. But what the Tata’s finally gave the Indian consumer, was a good looking car that pushed the boundaries of innovation, while not skimming on the basics that any consumer would come to expect. Just because it was unimaginable to have a real car at that price point back then, the Tata’s didn’t go wild by checking off the basics in terms of features, something a lot of brands tend to do to stay competitively priced.
Consider another example of how the thoughtful initiative by the former Delhi government of creating shelters for the homeless, backfired badly [read about it here]. There, not just the government, but any of us might have presumed the homeless should have been grateful to have the government build shelters for them to keep warm in Delhi’s harsh winters. But in reality, because of the lack of simple storage facilities for them, the homeless preferred weathering the bitter cold rather than risk their humble worldly possessions getting stolen in a homeless shelter that didn’t have lockers.
Tata Memorial hospital does it beautifully. They have retained humility and compassion in their care. Recently, some municipal officials razed a temporary structure adjoining the hospital that was used by the hospital to offer shelter and food for patients. How often do you hear of a hospital that not only tends to its admitted and OPD patients, but also tries offer care and support to patients waiting around the hospital? Interestingly, Justice Gauri Godse of the High Court condemned the municipal action, fining the body for the hospital’s legal fees, even going to the extent of stating that the municipal body was at liberty to recover the fine from its officers who were at fault.
Given the socio-economic divide that most of us have a relatively keen sense of, it is increasingly easy to forget we are all equal humans first. Let us behave and create more inclusively.
