This month, our accelerator teams are diving into a lab on human-centered design with GRID Impact. At the core of most accelerators, incubators or innovation “hubs” is the practice of getting to know your end user or your customer. Human-centered design has famously brought co-creation and empathy to the heart of innovation in the private sector.
As development workers, though, we often pride ourselves on being deeply empathetic, on both an organizational and individual level. Our programmatic frameworks are built on human rights and empowerment, after all. But how well do we really know the participants in our programs (our “end users”)? Lots of data from formative research and long-term local presence can sometimes lull us into a false sense of knowing more than we really do, especially when it comes to designing programs.
It’s only fair to illustrate the point by picking on myself. Years ago, I worked on CARE’s avian influenza portfolio. When avian flu first emerged, U.N. agencies and NGOs knew we had to act fast to provide advice to millions of backyard farmers across Asia. During those early days, CARE was one of the first organizations to raise issues from the perspective of local communities, such as the disproportionate impact that culling flocks was having on women since they were more likely to raise backyard poultry.
Because we were closer to the community, I was pretty confident CARE could develop useful guidance for farmers. We spent time on our formative research and got out to project sites to interview farmers. But when I got home, I did something that totally changed my perspective. I built a chicken coop, got a few chickens and put them in my backyard. I became a backyard farmer.
These were my chickens. You are looking at a picture of Lucile, Cordelia, Buffy and Rogue. In just a few weeks, these ladies taught me that many of those key messages that the humanitarian community collectively developed were actually pretty terrible and not at all practical. It wasn’t until I dove into an immersive experience to understand our “users” that the proverbial light bulb went off.
So our first question in the accelerator is, how can we push ourselves further in understanding our end user? Do we really understand the value of our innovation from our users’ perspective? Can we articulate it from the users’ perspective? What evidence do we have that our users see their problem and our solution the same way we do?
Also, as we scale, we have to shift our mindset to thinking about the people and institutions that will replicate or scale our innovation as users as well. How often do we miss the opportunity to design for their needs and constraints? If we don’t design our innovations with these implementers or “scalers” in mind, we will definitely fail to achieve uptake.
Of course, we always start implementation thinking that we know what the value proposition is for our end user. However, a key step in identifying our value proposition is being prepared to be wrong or not understand the full story. We need to be prepared to learn from our users and pay careful attention to unexpected results. At the beginning stages of an innovation it is critical to use qualitative methods that can capture unexpected value that the innovation has.
