Notes from Inc42Plus Maker’s Summit 2021–Build For Billions: Bringing An Inclusive Lens To Product Design

Build for Billions: Bringing An Inclusive Lens to Product Design

You can find the original video on Inc42’s website.

• Inserting design prompts in product to make the next billion-user feel at home
• How to iterate a product’s design for the Bharat user
• Designing a product with multiple value propositions in mind
• Building the right design stack for different sub-demographics of Bharat users

What does inclusivity mean?

An equal number of opportunities to everyone regardless of their background

Designing for everyone = designing for no one

• Inclusivity = Not just designing for everyone
• Design in a targeted manner and know who you’re designing for

Think about who am I excluding when am I building a design?

• Most products built inside the office aren’t used inside the office
• How can we make people who use the product, a part of the process itself?
• Designing for tier 2 and 3 cities as well

What are tier 2 and 3 cities?

• Tier 2 and 3 cities aren’t as sad and morose as conceptualized
• A great amount of online shopping is done in tier 3 cities since malls and brands aren’t typically present there
• Ironically, Gurugram and Hyderabad are considered tier 2 — based on the bookish definition. Hence, it’s worth step away from the textbooks and exploring.

Novel tier definitions based on socio-economic status and infrastructure

1. Tier 1: splurgers
2. Tier 2: strivers
3. Tier 3: survivors

• E.g. A better way to segregate would be based on their consumption patterns for Airtel (or based on your business needs) → What is each cohort’s Job To Be Done?

South-East Asian designers tend to look at the west for design inspiration

• But now the west is looking at South-East Asia for growth
• The west needs new ideas for the new economy.
• There needs to be a pool of design techniques made available to understand users in India — some techniques would work better in certain regions

Though a majority of users use the app in English

• Some users would like to receive help in their own language
• Some users would prefer contextual or region-based cues as they empathize with these better

Where should inclusivity start?

• Businesses are mechanized from the beginning — Businesses have to cut down their audience into cohorts to target them
• It isn’t a certain department’s (e.g., Leaders, Design) responsibility to ensure inclusivity
• Inclusivity should start from the very beginning of the product cycle, i.e., requirements gathering

Need to ask the product managers tough questions

• Do you have the value proposition campus?
• Do you have a definition of the people you’re trying to target?
• Do you have a customer journey made for your audiences?
• Whom do you want to reach out to first?
• If you can’t ask the right questions, hire someone to do so.

Small Experiments

• As a designer, you typically face resistance as companies believe what they’re doing is working
• The best thing you can do when starting out is to do small experiments
• As these experiments experience success or discover new ideas, the business starts to buy into doing more such experiments
• Do immersion trips and try and understand your customer base or to discover a new customer base
• Such trips also help discover new customer behaviors and habits
• You can’t design for inclusivity without understanding the user’s environment
• If you want something done, make it someone’s mission — they’ll be committed to doing it

Never constraint your knowledge early on in the design process

• Don’t be afraid to validate or invalidate your assumptions
• Whatever you know isn’t the only thing that is there to know
• Don’t be biased by your understanding
• Don’t let echo chambers, confirmation bias, sharpshooter fallacy affect you

Moving from tier 1 to tier 2/3 requires an entirely new strategy

• You can’t take a tier 1 approach and scale it to tier 2/3
• E.g., Spotify is using multiple languages, but being vernacular is just one strategy
• You need to unravel what tier 2 and 3 are doing before designing for them

Where does generational and inter-generational design stand in inclusivity?

• When we look at product placement, we’re trying to get the basic level of hygiene right
• Our duty to cater to things most of the people that consume

How to build an intuition when building for a completely new audience in an emerging market with no statistics or data?

• Through observation and interviews
• If it’s happening to more than five people consistently, then it seems to be a common practice going around.
• Use what the users already know and extend that familiarity to new products.

For every innovative design, it has to be 95% familiarity and 5% uniqueness.

One user’s clutter can be another user’s functionality

Sophistication doesn’t have to come at an opportunity cost to the other segment

• Tier 2: We need to take the English tax away and work with vernacular and still give all the values. Need to have a conversation with these people — conversational design is important.
• Tier 3: Tier 2 and solve for offline, sketchy networks and high data consumptions. Use colors, semantics to make the app a habit for the customers.

Can you design in a way that you can turn other folks into evangelists? (Turn learners into teachers)