UX food for thoughts: What’s your California Roll?
Two-cents on getting the quirk of your products from UX perspective
Lack of Problem-Solution Fit
Ever since 2009, when I established my very first venture—even before Valadoo—I have always known that solving user’s problem is essential to build an impactful and sustainable venture. Far before recent years thinking framework offered by the likes of Sprint (Jake Knapp, 2016) or Hooked (Nir Eyal, 2013) were published, however, my lack of experience brought me to believe that copying ideas from other startups in other markets with certain ‘adjustment’ to local quirk was a satisfactory approach.
It allowed me and the team to book around one million US dollar valuation within the first 7 months of our existence—not too shabby for a pre-series A Indonesian startup back in 2010.
But as we all know, getting funded is far from the end of the rainbow. The big question for me and the team back then was whether the problem we tried to understand and the solution that we came up to were a ‘good match’. When I came to a realisation on all of these, it was already too late.
UX Angle on Building a Sticky Product
Fast forward to mid 2015, fresh in the new journey at a fast-growing venture called Ruma, all that learnings essentially gave me a proper context on how we might develop products that solve the problem of Indonesia’s middle-to-low income communities alongside my friend, the CEO, Aldi Haryopratomo and the team. For the past 2 years, we are providing access to a quality and affordable household goods for middle-to-low income ladies — typically a hustler married women with kids—through a rotational group saving, or in our local term, an arisan. At Ruma, we call it Arisan Mapan.
Bu Dede Nurhayati from Depok, Teh Wiwin from Ciwidey and Teh Yayat from Cibeber, are three among tens of thousands Ketua Arisan that eventually became an evangelist and manage more than a hundred arisan groups because they had proven that this arisan model allowed her peers to get quality household goods like stove, clothing cabinet, underwear, washing machine and water dispenser by allowing them to save together with their friends. Buying things for essential household goods through Arisan might sounds silly for those who got plenty access towards sophisticated financial products provided by both bank and non-bank entities, but to many others, it is life-changing.
People Don’t Want Something Truly New, They Want the Familiar Done Differently —Nir Eyal.
In his book, Nir Eyal mentioned about how California Roll became the tipping point of Sushi popularity in the United States. In short, the success of California Roll in introducing sushi and Japanese cuisine at large in 1960s were occurred due to the effort of allowing the Americans to enjoy the sushi using the ingredients that they already know, i.e. rice, avocado, cucumber, sesame seeds, and crab meat — the only ingredient unfamiliar to the average American palate was the barely visible sliver of nori seaweed holding it all together. There is no fancy raw salmon or tuna that ‘scared’ many Americans back then due to perceived hygiene.
As explained by Monika Halim, the VP Design of Gojek, during her UX fundamental pitch at Ignition — the seminar of 1000 Startup Digital initiative, this California Roll example showed how a strong understanding of a market, coupled by a scrappy solution in doing things differently, allowed psychological transition in creating an intuitive user journey that drove behavioural change in the way the American perceived Japanese food.
Similar story being shared by Belva, the CEO of ruangguru.com. He told a story on how he managed to get more than 1.7 million students onboard within the past 6–8 months by working together with Ministry of Education of Republic of Indonesia and the local government to create a behavioural change in our education system, started by creating a centralized and reliable data source for the decision maker through their platform.
There is nothing new with the data. But they do things differently by providing the staffs at the Ministry of Education and local government a reliable real-time data on students’ grades and personal detail. A much better and easier-to-digest User Experience for the likes of school staffs and the typical bureaucrat.
Arisan Mapan as Our California Roll
This goes the same to Arisan Mapan. Arisan as a means to provide financial aids in many communities in Indonesia rooted back to decades ago where people save money together and mingle (or in local term, menjaga silaturahmi) among the arisan members. Taking it a bit further, from the mentors that we met at Google LPA, we learned that arisan, with certain tweaks in the execution, is also well known in Mexico as Tanda, in Kenya as Chama or Merry-go-round and in Philippines as Paluwagan.
The familiarity of arisan concept, combined with proper execution with the locals, became the key reasons why Arisan Mapan is considered to be a habit forming products—especially in conjunction to Ruma’s mission in increasing access, dignity and income for low-income communities through technology, including improving their financial literacy.
By using local wisdoms as main ingredients and wrapping it with a layer of user friendly technology as the nori, Arisan Mapan is our version of California Roll.
What’s yours?
Please do share your thoughts in the comment section and let’s learn together!
Note: There is another story on the UX process in how we scale the Arisan Mapan through technology. But I’ll save the story for later.
