 This is the best time to take a nice little nap, but I'm going to try to keep you awake. The title of the talk is an interesting one, the UX designer as a private detective. I'm just going to try to use a case study to show how things kind of get murky when you're trying to solve a problem with multiple stakeholders involved. So this is like a story. So the payload is I was working with Barilla, which is one of the world's biggest pasta and Italian food maker in the world. And I was about to finish my thesis with them, and then suddenly my manager comes and he says like, I don't think you can put any of this what you've worked in the last six months in your thesis. And you know, at that point of time, I was like, okay, so what do I really do? And then they said, okay, I'll talk to the PoloTechnico, and then I put the big boys to talk, PoloTechnico, Whirlpool, Barilla, they all hashed it out. And then they said, okay, you don't have to write a thesis. And I was like, all good for me, I mean like there's a 30,000 mandated thesis and I'll be the first person to pass out without writing one. And I was all smiles with that. So then I turn my attention to another side project that I've done, apart from the main thing that was going on. I was looking at another project which was Benessere Movimento, which in Italian basically means move health on the go. So this is part one in that project, what they were thinking that they were actually doing. So as I said, Benessere Movimento, it was a tie up between a hospital just on the outskirts of Milan, Hospitalis and Raffaele, and Barilla, and European Union's health division, and they were trying to create a vending machine that was purely touchscreen. You couldn't see anything but the touchscreen, and you order on that, it's a nice 23, 24 inch diagonal touchscreen, and they worked really hard on it. The main problem that they were trying to solve was when you're in Milan or any European city in the mornings, most of the people skip breakfast, they just pick up an apple, and on the way they'll have a coffee and the bar, and then if they're hungry again, they'll buy something from the vending machine. And most of the time what's happening over there is the vending machine only stocked one chocolate, soda, and barely anything which you can call healthy by a launcher. So this is what they built. They pretty much nailed the visual aspect of it. This is the coffee machine, these two are the food vending machines, and each of these machines actually cost 10,000 Euros. They put a lot of money in it, there's a lot of research done, and both the parties said, these are goals that we have to do, and we'll have to execute it in the next 7 to 8 months as a pilot program. But then when I came to the company, they were like, this is not working at all. Daily sales were less than 20 pieces each, monthly sales were less than 150 Euros, and this was a complete bust, they had spent over 50,000 Euros and nothing was happening, people just were not buying. And so since they saw me doing some service design, they were like, can you help in this? We are kind of stuck in this, otherwise you have to close it down in the next month. Okay, so I went there and then I just observed, I went there, I stood outside the vending machine, like nothing to do, and just people coming around, they're walking in this high footprint area, it's right. You go out of the hospital, it's a metro, it's right in between these two things. So over 5,000 people cross it every day. So this is the first step I did, I shadowed. So there's this really cool book I read, manual of direction, I'm going to use quotes from there, and try to put design parallels on it. So the expert detective's pursuit will go unnoticed, not because he is unremarkable, but rather like the suspect's shadow, he's meant to be there. So most of the people when they think user research, they try to go, you know, okay, we have to do a lot of planning, we'll have to recruit people, we'll have to do this and that, but actually the smallest thing, just going to your point of views and just observing people can give you a lot of ideas. How they're behaving with the non-human entities, how they're behaving with the human entities, what's really happening, are they angry, are they chill out, what's happening, even that can give you a lot of information. But, you know, user research traditionally in all the in companies, I mean, it's virtually not there, it's just not there. I've tried many companies and the only thing they do for user research, oh, I'll create a Google form and I'll ask everyone what do you want. That's it, that's user research. So this is what I have. So I was standing there two hours with some breaks and a total of 44 people walked into that space that I showed and it used to go like this. So this is the space. Oh, it's very nice. What is going on? That's the point. If I talk to them, did they understand anything over here? No, I don't know. What is it? That's the thing that will happen. So in Italian they'll say, what the fuck did these people actually do here? What is going on? They cannot understand what's going on. So 12 people actually tried and went, oh, it's a touchscreen. I don't know what is this. And two people actually had the money in their hands. They wanted to put it in the machine and get food, but they could not complete the transaction and then after trying five or six times, like fuck that. Off I go. So then the next step on evidence. So you've done a little bit of research. What he says on evidence is, objects have memory too. The donor remembers who opened it last, the telephone who answered it. The gun remembers when it was last fired and by whom. And it is for the detective to learn the language of these things so that he can hear them when they try to say something. So when you're trying to do a little bit of work on anything at all, you must try to understand what medium you're working with. Whether it's web, if it's anything at all, you at least should know what is going on. When you click a button, what happens? What is the things that are coming in? What's coming out? What sort of feedback should be given? So understanding the medium is sort of important if not tantamount. So this was my, you know, what I went back to, but I'll answer, okay, there are seriously some problems in there. There are 44 people, none of them could do anything. We need to change stuff. This is the screen. Imagine this is just slightly smaller. So this big, that's screens. And everything is selectable. Everything is intractable. Imagine the number of orange, sorry, purple boxes that you see. Almost all of them are intractable. And people do not know what can I click on or what can I touch. Plus the mental model for vending machine in particular is when you can see the food, you put in the number of the exact food you want and then you pay the money. Over here they change a lot of things. There was too much text on it. People didn't know what to do over here. Two, the location. So this is, as I said, between a hospital's basement and the metro. When you enter, exit from the hospital, you see this and this. And when you come, you're coming from the outside to the hospital, you see this and this. So this is just some resemblance of a poster that they have. And they could not find what is going on over there. What, is there something that needs my interest? Third thing, even the most illiterate guy who's selling vadapao on the street knows, I have to say I am selling vadapao, otherwise nobody's going to come to me. So they had made this elaborate ruse to sell healthy food, but not even a single place in this entire place said that you can actually buy food in this area. And people were not in the frame of mind to come and read all this text and try to understand what the hell is going on here. Dominic said last week that hospitals are places where you either go when you are dying or someone you know is dying. There are lots of things that are going ahead and nobody's going to open Zomato or Yelvin. What can I eat here? So I looked at all this thing and I'm like, I'm not going to work. And so Berilla was happy. Oh, you can change things. So this is point three. So you have something which is dead in water. You know, it's not going to work in your full range. Go save the damsel industries, the knight in shining armor. And this is what you have in front of you. It's a corpse. So many cases begin this with one. This can be disconcerting, but at least you know where you stand. Versus the corpse that appears pathway to your investigation and complicates everything. Best to proceed, therefore, with the vigilance of one who assumes that a corpse is likely around the next corner. That way it's likely to be your own. So something similar to this. I mean, I knew that there's a problem, but that would not be the end of it. I mean, this was too simple to be an open and shut case. So I went to both the parties and said, okay, I'm there. I'll solve your problem and no need to worry. And I'll do this on my own time, blah, blah, blah. So I'm in some more, if I solve problems, I'll do everything. And then I went out making everything, sleepless nights, three, four weeks. Then I had to communicate with the people to actually make the things. And then I got this. So this is the old design. This is the new design. I took in whatever inputs I could took from the people inside. I did a lot of, you know, low fidelity prototyping and showed to people inside Barilla, to people in bars who I never knew and could hardly talk Italian at all. And then made something which everybody liked. So I showed it to Barilla. They said, this really looks good. We'll go and talk to the hospital and, you know, get things done. The other thing that we changed apart from the interface was the communication around the place. So earlier, whatever communication was there about how to eat healthy and what happens when you eat healthy and really TLDR, I don't care. So what we did was make the communication really simple. So why una posa di benessere is, do you want a healthy snack? Straightforward communication. Again, where are you in a posa? Do you want a break? And directional posters. Okay, this is where you go to get stuff. And most people that I showed to thought that, okay, there is some logic and this might work. What do you think would be the reaction of the hospital? Who was the second stakeholder? Any guesses? This. So we present and then they said, no, this is not going to work and we can't allow Barilla to do the branding and we can't change. Our goal is to educate people and people are not eating healthy, blah, blah, blah, all sorts of things and Barilla wanted to introduce new things. I mean, one of the things that I miss in India is they had a small chocolate cake which is like a chocolate cake. It's 80 calories. They make it by steaming and they wanted to introduce it in here. And the hospital says, we can't allow cakes to be sold in a healthy store. So the concept of what is healthy was so rudimentary and so set in stone that they can't demand it. The case, most of the times what happens is you're out of the house, you have five euros in your pocket and you're hungry. So instead of buying a chocolate and a can of coke, if you can buy something which is way more healthier, that is a win situation. But the hospital says no. We just cannot allow, there's a European Union this and European Union that. And then they came back to Milan and tell me, okay, Apoor, whatever you did, it's like down the drain. And this was me. And they're like, what? This is so... What? And then unsuspects. So they will present themselves to you first as victims, as alias, as allies, as eyewitnesses. Nothing should be more suspicious than someone who's trying to help you. Only if somebody is acting completely insane that he's really affected by something that's happened. So people who come ahead and say, you can't really believe what people say. You only can believe what they do. So people will come and you ask me, how do you save your files? Oh, I go to save and I go to this and I go to my folder and I have the project name and what they do is they save the file on desktop. So the other thing, on nemesis. So normally what you want to do is very ideological, you know, I want to solve the world's problem. But really when you have someone who is doing the exactly opposite and you come to know, okay, this is not what I'm trying to do and this is what I can really do and this is how we need to proceed. So nemesis usually is one of the best things. Black hat people are necessary for UX design. Otherwise your project sucks. Because until you've seen a true blue black hat person, you cannot weed out every possible kink in your armor. So part two, what they really were doing. And on surveillance is rather, you know, for UX designers you always have to keep your eyes open. Nobody told me that I'll be working on a vending machine anytime soon. But you keep your eyes open. You see how people, you know, work with vending machines, how they go there, how they behave when they're trying to select the food item among it and what happens when it eats up your money or the food gets stuck somewhere, what do they do? So these things you continuously have to, you know, keep absorbing inside yourself and then remembering how human beings behave around these things. And it's all about the users. So surveillance always keep your eyes open. You might be thinking, oh, I'm not going to make a spoon, but why not? Maybe tomorrow you'll have a fingerprint thing to be done and you never know. This is what was happening there. So Barilla and Ospedale were two main entities and they were working completely against each other, but they never knew it. They both said my goal is to educate users, Barilla says my goal is to test out my new line of healthy food products and they both agreed, but then the way they want to do it was completely different. So you never, you never talk about these things that I don't want your branding to be there. You know, if you have a client and if you have a client, you cannot say that I don't want to see your face till the project ends, okay? Just give me the project, go away, come back when the thing is done. That's what's going in your head, but then you can't really say it to them. So they were fighting against each other and the problem at hand was one of the world's oldest problems. You know, should I go for a jog or should I shut down and watch that, you know, house episode that's on Star World now? So Apple versus donut was the main problem. How do you select the right thing? And what Barilla was trying to do was just on money. They didn't really care. The only thing they cared is, okay, we'll sell this and see which one is selling more because all the products in the vending machine were pilot products. So there are fruit juices and everything which Barilla didn't go, you know, all over Europe by then, but they were only being tested in that vending machine. So they wanted to validate which ones will sell, which ones won't and then since only 20 things are being sold, they're not really getting that feedback. And the hospital says, I don't care about Barilla. I just want the money to make this vending machine so that it looks cool in a hospital and we educate everyone about heart disease. But no, I mean, both at the same time if you do not take the right approaches, never want to happen. So I knew this is the problem. So what he says about infiltration is the hideout, the safe house, the base of operations. You can always assume that the enemy has this, but whatever, you know, even if you know that there is one, I mean, what do you do about it? So I knew what is the problem, but Allah is fighting against this guy and they don't want to agree. What do I do about it? I'm just an innovation intern in a multi-million dollar company. Nobody listens to me actually. So, you know, what they should be doing right now? I mean, in my head, the answer was clear. The answer was this. But that wouldn't have a lot of traction. So listen to the user. I mean, the kind of research that they had done before was, I mean, I don't know how did they agree to it. There were questions like, and the first question in the survey, how much did you like the machine? Like, they don't even ask whether you liked it or no, how much did you like between one to five? Was it good? It was like amazing. I mean, purely leading question to improve their, you know, NPSC sat whatever scores they want to do. So what did I do about it? I mean, I was in a place where I wasn't involved in the project and nothing was happening. So I went and talked to the head of innovation department again and he said like, okay, we need to get something done and so although the project hospital had very strong backing, you know, they had European unions, health department talking to Borralla and all that thing and they were really powerful people, but I had the backing of something even more powerful than the European union and that's the euros themselves. You know, Borralla said, okay, if you're not going to do this our way, it's the highway to no money. You know, we are pulling the funds. You can continue with the product. We don't want Borralla to be associated anymore because there's no value in it for us. So then we gradually implemented the changes I've done, the new interface, the communication changes, et cetera, et cetera, and this was the result after about 10 months. I mean, I couldn't see to the end of this project. I had to come back to India, but this was the results that they sent me later. The time taken for the purchase had dropped by 2.4 times. So from 45 seconds to complete a purchase, it went up to 19%. The conversion level was twice and the monthly revenue went up four times. Even then, it was a big fail for the thing because most of the people already had seen that machine and were disillusioned about this is not going to help me. So because the user research was not initially done correctly, the project was a big failure. Over 100,000 euros put into it over the 10 months and nothing came out of it. What can we learn here? I mean, this is probably something that I'll be repeating for a number of... Everyone must have said this. So the role of the UX designer when you see on services like this where you're not really directly dealing with interfaces or anything in general, if you're UX designer, your main role is not making the solution. Your decision is to identify the right problem to solve within that context of the project and then guide the people who can actually build it and make these experience for the people. The detectives themselves never go and arrest the people. It's not in their power. It's not in our power to make the perfect software machine or whatever experience, but rather tell the people who have this know-how on what problem to solve for the people so that it's most value. Who remembers this guy? He used to be in every street or every market of India doing his work in a corner with a bulb hanging over it. He's the guy who repaired watches. So this was a guy who... He's like a really important person. So UX designers right now are starting to get this importance. You are the people who can make my software awesome. But then he was replaced by another guy. Until it comes, you can have a guess. Who replaced the watch repairers? Mobile repairers. So the problem they are solving is in a unique zone. I can't repair my mobile. I can't go to the Samsung's factory if it's out of warranty. They have two busy companies. So there's this person sitting there who can do it for me. So UX designers are something like that in the organization right now. I mean this guy knows what makes my software good and what makes my software back. Though in some gray area I do the same thing. What makes my product awesome. But then UX designers are actually the people who can get the thing shipped out. The next slide obviously is the person who's repairing mobile phones. But then the final slide comes to, again, the role of the UX designer is never going to go obsolete as long as the world needs problem solvers. So our goal should be, you know, not to go to that medium and then become so in love with medium that I start designing only for that. UX designers should be at a place where they have a bird's eye view of what exact problem to be solved. If we can't tell that to the people who are solving the problem, then we might as well join them and, you know, start doing the dirty work and getting a hands-on in making stuff. If you call yourself a UX designer slash service designer, whatever, your aim should be to identify problems. And there will be changes always. So this is what we're doing today. Tomorrow there are variables, the, you know, decade after that might be augmented organisms. After that it might be, you know, Ice Age which has usability issues. And then there will be time machines, you know, time stamp that you take for granted for every interaction. It does not hold true anymore. So this interaction happened yesterday, does not make sense anymore. How do you change the entire paradigm? So identifying the problems of what you're trying to solve, who are you trying to solve is basically what we're supposed to do. That's it, I think. Questions? Time? No?