Design Jam with TTC Labs by Facebook
Accessibility and Trust for Financial Inclusion in Bharat
Since we haven’t updated you guys in a long time. Let’s start at the beginning. Parallel Labs, helps teams create better digital products using Design Sprints.
Not to brag but we were the first ones to start design sprints in India and until now we have successfully done 15+ sprints.
So when TTC Labs by Facebook decided to run design workshops in India they contacted us.
What is TTC Lab and why were they running design workshops?
They are an innovation lab by Facebook working on improving user-experience around personal data. Last year TTC Labs hosted a series of workshops with policy professionals and civil society to unpack privacy in the Indian context. One of the focus areas that emerged from these workshops was an interest in understanding
How can we create trust, transparency, and control in the digital experience for the next billion, first-time internet users?
They wanted to hold several 1-day Design Jams in India to understand the challenges start-ups are facing in doing so and co-create potential solutions with them.
Another important part of the story is D91 Labs
It is an open-source initiative by Setu to understand and enhance the lives of Bharat through financial inclusion.
When Dharmesh from D91 attended a design jam by TTC labs in Singapore he was really impressed by how quickly a group of people can come up with a practical solution for existing problem start-ups are facing. He thought it will be amazing to bring it to India and solve problems around financial inclusion for the masses.
Now that you are all caught up, let’s discuss the jam.
The Jam,
Design for Bharat
Accessibility and Trust for Financial Inclusion.
Why this theme?
India is going through a data revolution and is set to soon pass a dedicated data privacy law with detailed obligations for companies. As more people come online in India, there is an explosion of the consumer and behavior data that is being generated and this is expected to be a $1 trillion opportunity.
With such a huge opportunity also comes the responsibility to handle data with care. We all agreed with Facebook’s belief that designers have a big role to play in bringing trust, transparency, and control in digital products.
The Process:
The next step was to decide who should be a part of this design jam.
The people participating in the jam were a good mix of Designers, Design Managers, Researchers, Product managers as well as folks from policy and legal departments from each segment of the Fintech companies in India. The segments including Investments, Lending, Insurance, Payments, etc.
The diversity in each team ensured an effective jam.
The activities were designed to re-frame the audience’s mindset to think in terms of privacy, trust & transparency as well as understand the target audience for whom they will be solving the challenge statement.
The Day of the Event:
We started with Dan addressing the room and making sure everyone gets comfortable as well as acquainted by what is the purpose of the jam before embarking on any activities. Dan who is the Head of Data Strategy at Facebook flew down from Dublin to moderate the event.
We also brought in some subject matter experts to help the room with real-life insights.
The first three activities and expert talk were designed to introduce everyone to the basic elements of design, content, and data use cases.
Understanding transparency
For this, each team was given a data use notice (what data was being used and why) and then they had to decide on when during the user journey they want to educate the user on and how.
Know your audience
We created partial personas and the participants then had to discuss among their teams and fill up the missing parts. This activity helped in immersing the participants into understanding personas they had to work with later in the day.
Power of words in Design
The teams were split into smaller groups of 2 and 3 and given common examples of Terms and conditions which are usually full of legal jargon. The task was to re-write it based on tone/audience, depending on the card they picked.
The final challenge: Ideate and prototype.
For this, we created fictional apps based on challenge statements. The fictional nature of the apps kept the participants unbiased and acted as a great resource for quick problem-solving which applied to the problems real products in Fintech start-ups in India are facing.
D91 team was a great help here as they have conducted extensive interviews and research on understanding the Indian population and published articles on the same. The user personas and challenge statements used in our activities came from their research, based on which we developed fictional apps.
At the end of this challenge, the teams had to not only ideate a solution based on the challenge statement but also create a prototype and present. They had 4-hours to do so. It sounds like too little time to design anything, right?
But they all pulled it off, 8 unique solutions at the end of the day. Success!
How did we do it?
The secret is a mix of a powerful design process & facilitation that helps people collaborate and co-create in a time-boxed environment. See the TTC Labs toolkit for all the resources that we used to put this together.
At the end of the day, we did achieve our goal of the participants not just having a better understanding of designing products for Bharat but also have practical, applicable takeaways for problems that some of them might be facing with their products. 🙌
Have an interesting problem to solve?
Write to us.
…
Location: #WeWork (Thanks guys!)
Thanks to the participating companies:
Facebook, D91, Setu, Takshashila, SmallCase, WhatsApp, Zest, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, PhonePe, Scripbox, Razorpay, Cleartax, and Flipkart.
