Reflection ­ Visualization Tool

Challenge

In developing nations marginalized sections of the society do not have access to basic

necessities of life like food, shelter, health and education. Among many reasons one of the

prime reason is lack of information on availability of low­skilled jobs in their neighbourhood

which meets their skill sets. With the introduction of Android One and other cheap

smartphones in developing world, it has been observed that 1 in 100 low­income households

have started to get access to smartphones and as smartphones become more cheaper their

reach is bound to increase by many folds.    If somehow we can provide them connectivity to tailored Apps which can provide them with

information on available jobs, shelter homes, free health care centers we can help them

move up the ladder.    Jobs  Here we will focus on providing them opportunity to find jobs. Jobs like plumbing,

carpentering, gardening, car driving, farming could be catered by providing connectivity

between job seekers and providers in the neighbourhood.     Selection  We selected Visualisation tool because it helped in making an abstract idea of empowering

low­income group more concrete and understandable to others. It also helped in

brainstorming on different personas of job seekers and an effective user interface for the job

providers.    The reference to this tool in lecture by Designer Angela Meyer brought insights into how

important this tool is at every stage of design the product in terms of brainstorming,

prototyping and knowing the context of problem we’re trying to solve.    Application  Because of the large user base for this App, we needed to identify different personas of job

seekers with different skill sets, so we choose Visualization tool to draw them on whiteboard.    The visualization tool helped in capturing job seekers in terms of opportunities:

­ Semi­skilled job seekers

­ Unskilled job seekers

We came with personas from people with multiple skill sets like car driving, type writing etc

to people with single skill set like labour jobs. See diagram below for people with different

skill sets:

The tool also helped in knowing the context of the problem where we came to know that job

seekers are of two types:

­ Mobile (work requires them to move from place to place)

­ Immobile (they can do the job from their home; cannot travel far from their home)

This information provides us useful information when providing the list of job seekers to the

job provider in the neighborhood.    Since the userbase is not tech savvy the hardest problem is to design an App which most of

users can understand intuitively and does not require any education or language barriers. So

we decided to use visualization tool to brainstorm on universal symbols / signs that would

make this App easy to use.    After we had the consolidated information of people with their skills and location, it was now

time to provide Job providers with best available person closest to their location.    Visualization helped us come up with UI which is intuitive and also merges geographical

location of job seekers using Google Maps. So the job provider can simply type in search bar

for the skill they are looking for like car driver and UI would show the list of car drivers in the

vicinity, see diagram below with template.

There are many uncovered flows to make this idea a reality, but we could not cover entire

flow due to time and space restrictions.    Insight  Applying the visualization tool opened a whole world of ideas in capturing and

brainstorming the over the problem and possible solutions. Previously I used to get stuck

with mental blockages of it is a hard problem to solve. It never occurred to me before that

drawing personas with sticks is so simple and getting my point across the board is so easy

now.

It never seemed to me before that even for finding job for low­income group there could be

so many different ​personas and each could have different story to tell. And only after

evaluating their context, limitations we can try to address the problem and not in isolation.    The approach also taught me to be ​emphatic to users before we can even define the

problem space. Their education and awareness levels was one key point in designing an

intuitive user interface.    Approach

Given more time I would have liked to interact with more and more people representing

different personas to get the insights into their living conditions, how difficult it is to find jobs,

barriers on doing certain jobs due to caste or religious preferences, will having this App in

offline mode help them save some data.    After we’ve more insights into the context of the problem we’re trying to solve, we would also

like to use storytelling tool to approach Angel Investors and others to get across the problem

we’re trying to solve. Approach government agencies and NGOs in spreading the word

about such an App that empower their livelihood. Using prototyping and early launch we

would also like get our App to first 100 users and refine the App.    In future we would like to add more features to find affordable health care centers, spread

the information on their rights to government sponsored free education, health etc.

