Making the most of field research through creative engagement practices: Mobility Mapping

This series documents the tools and activities adopted and created by Ideate for its projects. They are often context-specific and may not be applicable elsewhere as is. But they can serve as inspiration and point of learning on how visualization and gamification can be used to stimulate respondents and improve the quality of research.

“After I drop my son to school, I sometimes do my groceries at the store that’s on the walk back home. It doesn’t have much, but it’s on the way so it’s easy for me to go there,” Nargis recalls as she traces her journey to and from the places in her community. She goes on to tell us of the route she takes when it’s saawan, of the woman carrying a gathri of clothes on her head she often encounters, and why she avoids the shorter route to the wagon stop. These are details we would not have collected without the aid of the mobility mapping tool.

The context

During the scoping of our project on financial agency of low-income women in Pakistan, it became increasingly clear that a thorough understanding of mobility needs to be a fundamental objective of the research. The project placed a focus on financial inclusion through digital financial services, and it was important to learn how and where could access be baked in for women. As they currently stand, customers need to seek these services out on their own, often at locations that are not comfortable for women.

Relevance of DFS in women’s lives cannot be built without beginning from the places they have easy access to — a hypothesis repeatedly validated in this and other similar human-centered design projects of Ideate.

We initiated this focused approach by including a separate section on mobility in our discussion guides. In addition to the obvious questions around the places they visit, we also added queries on their aspirations, such as what places in their community would they like to go to, but don’t. We soon realized that there were too many questions to ask. Respondents will get uncomfortable with the intrusive nature and we will not get the depth we’re looking for. To take the pressure off and keep the women engaged, the mobility section was converted into an activity.

What we made

The idea was simple: ask the women we interact with to draw a line map of their community, and put basic shapes like circles and squares for places they visit. We would then drive conversations around these places by invoking memories associated with them. So instead of direct questions like how frequently they visit, we begin by asking when was the last time they went there? What was it for? What was the weather like that day? Is the visit an occasion that they plan for in advance? What do they see on the way? How is the visit different if a friend tags along? This narrative flow of conversation would turn the respondents into storytellers of their experiences at those places.

Limitations faced

When the tool was deployed in field, it took care of the discomfort we were concerned about. Participants eagerly started off with the map, but then ran into a roadblock. They were only able to put down a maximum of three places on their own. We had to mention several possible locations that they overlooked before they continued on the map. This made them feel awkward for forgetting.

Another problem was that most of these women were illiterate and could not read or write. We had gone in with the assumption that they would be able to draw basic lines, but it wasn’t the case. Because they had never written, they were of the view that they cannot doodle either. It was hard to convince them otherwise, and pushing for it would have been insensitive.

The tool had addressed engagement in part, but faced other unforeseen challenges. Instead of abandoning it altogether, we improvised and made an iteration based on our learning from the first few days.

How we revised

Through the first couple of interviews, we gathered a list of places that were drawn and acknowledged from the ones we mentioned. We used that list and designed a mock map ourselves. Places on this map were represented by icons without any text to identify what the places were. This was primarily because it would have been redundant as our target persona could not read. But it was also so that we could keep the icons open for interpretation. For example, the book icon we used was for a school, but it was also interpreted as a madrassah for evening Quran lessons. The dress icon was interpreted as a cloth shop, as well as the house of the woman who stitched clothes. This allowed for a wider range of places to be represented on the map, encompassing the daily lives of the individual.

For the rest of the research, we showed this map and used the same storytelling method to gain insights. The tool led to the finding that clothing shops are the one place where women in our research were most in control outside of their homes, had the least amount of resistance to visit from men in their families, and felt relatively safe. This was crucial as one of the concepts we developed was to take elements from these spaces and incorporate them at DFS points. More on this can be found in the country report, here.

Future use

Since the iteration we made was during the research phase with very little time to fix tools, there are improvements that can still be made to make it even simpler for respondents to interact. If another project with a focus on mobility comes our way, or if you wish to adopt the tool in your own work, here are some adjustment that should be made:

• Replace icons with actual images. Icons are not always self-explanatory, especially for people with low literacy. Replacing the icons with real-life pictures of the same item would eliminate the effort required to decipher them.
• Make the visuals inclusive. There is a tendency to represent places with symbols that are associated with a certain class or religion. For example, the place of worship in our map was represented by a mosque. It should be kept inclusive of other religions. Similarly, venues of entertainment are represented by the icon of a theater, which was entirely misplaced given the context. The icons of houses with sloped roofs are nothing like what the houses in the research areas looked like, or even generally in Pakistan.
• Make it more map-like. Instead of using straight solid lines, make them curvy and color them in the texture of streets or dirt roads, depending on the context.
• Map the mobility of men. To draw a comparison and gauge how restricted the agency of women is compared to men in the community, this activity should also be conducted with them. This will likely add a lot more places to the map, and a conversation around the aspirations of women can be drawn.
• Turn the places into cards. The tool can be made more interactive if the visuals are printed on a deck of cards that’s put in front of the participant. They pick out relevant ones and arrange on an empty map or axis according to distance. This variable can be anything you want. Instead of distance it could be frequency of visit, feeling of comfort, or even tendency of traveling alone. This will turn it into a dynamic tool that you can use to get insights on a specific aspect of mobility.

These are all things we are excited to implement in the future to center the activity around the respondents, and make the insights richer.