 Now we have Kavita, who would talk about the user research methodologies to help us develop such empathy and create the amazing user experiences. So please welcome Kavita. Hi, good afternoon everyone. So I'm here today to talk to you all about the importance of user experience research and how much of a difference it's actually made to the work that we do at Pensa Design. To give you a little bit of background into what we do, we're a design thinking, Pensa Design is a design thinking and innovation consulting firm and our core competencies are in customer research, experience innovation and the culture of innovation, right? So customer research is at the heart of everything we do, whether it's experience innovation, whether it's culture of innovation or standalone research projects. Customer research is where everything really begins and you know we combine, the team is made up of a diverse bunch of people where we combine all of our strengths and behavioral insights to ultimately build to understand customers and then build our products and solutions itself. I'm showing this because it kind of gives you a glimpse into the kind of work we do. It's not limited. We're not domain agnostic. We don't get limited or slotted into particular domains only but with design thinking, we've in fact been able to do a plethora of work ranging from consumer businesses to technology to finance. A lot of people ask the question, why customer research, right? Often clients come and tell us but we know our customers. Why do you need to go and do customer research, right? So our answer to them is always, you know, you've known your customers evolve over time and it's important for us to understand, give us the opportunity to understand your customers while you may know them, give us the opportunity to understand them a little better so we can deliver better for you. Often we come back with insights that most companies do not even, have not even thought of, have possibly not even have a hint about. So I'll walk you all through one case study today from work that we've done but particularly in this case, why customer research, it is to decipher between intention and behavior. Often customers speak in the form of intention and it's not to say that they lie about things but, you know, you've talked in the form of intention but it's very, very important to see what they do and how it translates into behavior, what exactly they're trying to do while they say they want to do something. The second thing is the jobs to be done, to identify the jobs, the main jobs that customers are trying to get done, right? And what work around, so you might have existing solutions for it but there's always these additional workarounds, these very interesting little workarounds that you see customers do on their own and the third thing of course is to check our unconscious biases. Sometimes we don't even know these exist when we go into the field, often we go with our own biases and we don't even realize that we have them but going out there in the field talking to customers gives us that little bit of a reality check and makes us, you know, reflect on what we think we know. So this is the case study I'm going to talk about. So we did some work for a financial research firm that was also looking to explore opportunities in the market and build solutions for low-income customers, right? So our main problem was how are low-income customers and in this case particularly it was migrants managing their personal finances. So there was a lot of conversation about remittances and money being sent back to hometowns but people wanted to know what people were doing in this space and if there was opportunity for solutions or products to come into the market. As you can see our research started out across four cities, Pan India and we spoke to about 70 odd individuals, right? Some of our methodologies, contextual inquiry one way, so you're in the person's space in their environment while you're doing the research. We used games, a lot of interactive techniques, games for people to work with and why games because we're talking about a very personal thing like finance, your personal finance. It's a very uncomfortable topic for a lot of people or so we thought which is why we developed all of these games that we wanted to talk about, right? There's something else called the sandwich method and the sandwich method is a very very simple technique. You ask questions then you follow it up with a show me how, show me how you do this and then you follow that up again with more questions. Why do you do it the way you do? Lot of why questions so we call it the sandwich method because we have those three things that we do particularly and of course your typical group discussions, storytelling techniques again which tied back into our games that we into the games that we were using. The next phase as you can see was about the inciting process so we've done all of this research there's so many people you've spoken to so much data that we have how do you make sense of it, right? So the inciting process as you can see we had things so we use something called the scatter plot. We use the empathy map I'm guessing a few of you here would be using that. The journey line, personas all of this gave us far more insight to the problem of the challenge at hand itself. Some of the insights that you can see are managing money and money out really beats the happy out of money, right? We all earn money it feels so good when you get that paycheck it feels so good when that money is deposited in your bank account but the fund really just stops there often because what you're doing after that is you're managing your money in and money out something has to go towards a loan repayment something has to go towards your rent your monthly rent it kind of beats the happy out of what's supposed to be a fun thing, okay? Moving on quickly we also our process itself so co-creation is a very very big part of what we do we work very very closely with our clients we think it's very important to involve them in the process so as you can see through co-creation we develop multiple ideas which we then prototyped and tested almost immediately and then went on to develop the solution once we had good validated learnings to talk about the specific research methods itself so these are some techniques we used as you can see in the first picture it's a board game a very simple board game that we had scenarios written out on so people through these like used to dice rolled it every time they landed on a particular they got to pick a card and we had these scenarios listed out so what it helped people do is remove themselves from the situation so you paint a picture for them and ask them for their opinion on it right and these are scenarios that have that we know have happened in in and around their environment so they could remove themselves from the picture even if it happened if it had happened to them so they could talk about it a lot more comfortably right the other thing we were trying to do trying to understand how they manage their money which is the money and money out and of course that's not a nice conversation to have it's not nice to walk up to somebody and say hey you know can you tell us what your salary is how do you balance your money how do you manage it so as you can see in the second picture we used little pictures there and as we walked through the game we could paint a picture of where does your money typically get spent so people spoke about it very very naturally and so we had all these pictures to indicate certain things so we said hey this what about medical bills you know do you have them often what happens exactly grocery how much do you end up spending so what we were essentially building out was there banks I mean if they had a bank statement it was essentially how money money was going in going out and what bank statements will not do for you is as you can see this guy's written in this picture you'll see something called a sister's expense you know they're spending money for people within their ecosystem they're doing things within their ecosystem there's something called brother which goes into detail he's like money was spent out of pocket these things don't get accounted for right but these are things you learn this is what happens in real life for them it's money they're giving to neighbors they lend learning to neighbors because someone's come and ask them for money there's money being spent on medical bills so you're learning a lot more about his life than just his expenses and finally what we said was in a situation okay now the other technique we used was we said when we learned how much money they were making sometimes we would give it to them and say hey can you tell us how you how you distribute this money where does this money go currently so they gave us the full picture and then finally we said okay say you had a windfall of some sort what would you do with this money now so then it and they would talk about all these big dreams they had few things that they would want to put their money against for some people it was I want to put money against my daughters I'm planning for my daughters wedding 18 years down the line I'll put money there for some people it was I want to buy a car and often one of our things with checking our unconscious biases was often you go in thinking people plan for the long term right they're putting money away for their children's education they're putting money away to buy a house but really it was it was the small things everything they were saving for was not more than two years away and it was important for us to internalize in that moment that and often there were people spending money on things that we thought were we were like you know you could be putting that towards savings but people really wanted to enjoy their money because it's not it doesn't come by easily so it is important for them to enjoy it when they had it and it was important for us to understand that and accept that through the research so the next thing we did was there were certain patterns and themes that we observed during the research the initial research that we conducted and what we learned was a lot of people have control have problems like problems seeding control of their money to do an establishment right they would rather give it to somebody who we eventually started calling the uncle because almost everybody we spoke to had an uncle that they would turn to for advice you know someone who said you know you give me your money and I'll keep it safe for you or they would tell them where to invest their money like the eternal advisor that they would turn to then there are other things that are on understanding money and money out so what we did here was in the research phase itself built very quick dirty prototypes to go back and test in the field because these were assumptions we were making in a way based on the themes and patterns we were hearing so we said let's go and test it out right and as you can see we were testing out different themes people willingness to seed control who in their ecosystem do people turn to typically not family not friends it would be neighbors they were far more comfortable doing things like take borrow money from their neighbors than take it from their family itself right finally using all of this information we said okay let's make sense of it and some techniques that we used something called a scatter plot which you would never think to use in behavioral research but what was funny as you can see I mean I'm sorry you can't see on the screen here but on the on the x-axis what we had was how people were managing money and money out whether you know people money out was more than money in money in equals money out so we had that across the x-axis along the y-axis we had the willingness to seed control and we plotted people against that this gave us very very interesting insights into the way people were very seemingly different people that seem to behave very similarly so it was really interesting some of the things that we saw were really really interesting of course personas and journey lines we know all of this all of this information to ultimately get to these insights it was funny how so we did this other round of longitudinal research we went back after some time with the same some of the few people that we didn't interviewed in the first phase we went back to again and there are some stories that really stay with you right there was this one lady who in the first round of research that we did seemed made sufficient money for herself just about to be able to run her household and put some money aside her husband wasn't working because of some injury confident woman she was amazing she had everything planned to a T she said this is where my money goes this is the chit fund I put the money in because I know I want the money at some point she had everything sorted so confident very very impressive we go back about one and a half months two months later and the the woman was shattered absolutely shattered because her life had changed her husband suddenly needed emergency surgery she did not even have the ability to have a conversation with us because she said I cannot even think please don't ask me any questions I can't think she's like all I'm thinking about right now is my husband surgery and how I will fund it there's another girl young girl who was saving money to buy a car because she said my friends all own cars even I want to own a car so I'm putting money aside to save for the car two months later we went back to her her car fund had been set aside because her parents had asked her for money to make repairs back at home construction house repairs back at home so she's like my plans have changed and there's obviously a visible disappointment but they have no control over these things and that fund that they were setting aside had just dropped off their minds it was they want it's not something they were even thinking of restarting again right so what was very very important for us to do one of the big things we took away in terms of the research was that people need resilient strategies in an approachable environment so as much as people might fall off the wagon it's very very important to put them back up there and how do you do that right our solution then went into making sure we help people continue to retain that habit even if they fall off which very very often happens it's important to find a way to bring them back up there so they can continue the habit and not drop it at any point thank you thank you Kavita it was wonderful just a small token of appreciation on the behalf of the Ux India and workshop and all the top participants it was really nice having you here