Project 4/B started out as a way for us to explore an area, discipline, professional arena or other context in which we would like to introduce change in. I began to brainstorm about ideas and areas which interest me, and started to think about topics such as money, art, education, the digital world etc. As I started to think about a topic which was inclusive for all, I arrived at the word “Empathy”. Empathy is the ability to emotionally engage with other’s thoughts, feelings and well being.
I decided to focus on “everyday objects” and people who use them. I started thinking about this with my home, India in particular, with respect to lower income, illiterate and disabled people, about a quarter of the whole country’s population is still not educated, while these numbers are steadily decreasing, yet is being hindered due to factors like wage disparities, gender discrimination, and technological barriers. The government has also digitized the process and application of various documents such as passports, drivers license, and unique identification cards. I was aware of how difficult it was to navigate the website as I had tried it myself, that made me wonder about how people from other backgrounds find their experience to be like? As a beginning point I decided to look into various such different websites and applications and to understand their navigation and usage, and moreover the guidelines which are used to make them. I looked at a report by McKinsey which spoke about the challenges being faced by India in the digital field, which highlighted the issues that need to be looked at when catering to such a vast audience.
Stakeholders:
The stakeholders in this project would be the users and the designers in this case. To delve more into this, I decided to interview both stakeholders of this issue in my opinion. I decided to interview two househelp employees from my apartment complex, two UX designers who are currently working. Both the househelp employees Daksha and Mohan, had one thing in common, that neither of them were able to finish their schooling, due to financial and personal reasons. When asked about how well they were able to navigate through digital platforms, they also had difficulty navigating quite a few of them. When I asked them about their use of the government applications they said instead of using the applications themselves they would rather have someone else do it, or do paperwork manually at the government offices.
I was able to get a more deeper insight into this as I spoke to the designers, Poorva and Preksha are both currently working at two firms as UX design. The phrase which was most highlighted during my conversation with them was, “were not designed to cater to these groups”, the applications were designed to be a means to an end instead of creating a more full-filled user experience. The accessibility element in most of these applications is still lacking which does end up creating a divide. The other element which they both emphasized on was assistance, where assistance is necessary when catering to such a broad audience, and keeping in mind these niche groups while looking at the big picture.
The Change:
The change in this project is a little challenging to come up with as the audience in this case is very broad, and applications are built and run by large corporations. The creation of the actual change in this project can be quite expensive economically, and will go through a lot of red-tape for it to be created. The main solution in this case would be to explore more ways of ensuring a better user experience, such as creating specific structured guidelines to ensure inclusivity of all these groups, a better research journey with each of these specific groups to know their needs, environments, their patterns etc.
The solution will aim to understand the users better and anticipate their needs. As I have already conducted interviews with the two stakeholders of this issue, my next course of action would be to conduct an intervention to pin-point issues that need to be solved when looking at this problem. I am also considering conducting a survey to get more diverse view-points on this issue.
