Welcome back.

In this lecture, we're going to bring back Apala Chavan,

who was a guest in our second course when we're talking about

contextual inquiry to take us through an interesting design case.

This is a case built around the idea of supporting

Financial Self-Help Groups Among low literacy individuals in India and

serves as a nice counterpoint to some of the examples

that we've been using in that it brings up a whole bunch

of different issues in technology, design challenges.

And in the end a very different approach to have this problem would be solve,

even if grounded in the same basic principles of design.

For those of you who may not have seen her earlier interview, I'll introduce Apala,

she is the Chief Design and Delivery Officer at Human Factors International.

She is awarded highly in probably beyond that just

known widely as a leader in the field of Human Computer Interaction and

particularly design in emerging markets including in India.

Her TEDx Talk on the Three Laws of User Experience, quite popular.

You can follow her online via Twitter.

Or you can just stay tuned and listen to her live here in person.

So welcome, Apala.

Good to have you back.

>> Thank you, Joe.

I'm really happy to be back.

>> So let's jump right in.

You were telling me about a very interesting project around

financial literacy, self help groups.

Why don't you just tell us about the problem that you were trying to

address and then some of the design directions that you ended up exploring.

>> Sure.

So this is in fact, one of the most interesting projects that I've worked on.

And while this is not really a commercial project,

it was an a R&D project, and it was done with media labs Asia.

So there was a team from media labs Asia, and of course looking.

So this is what we set out to do, microfinance.

That's the area that we were delving into.

And microfinance, lately, of course has been very popular.

So the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh is very well known, etc.

So microfinances sort of defying this where financial services of

all kinds including loans and savings products, insurance, etc.

All of these is provided to pour the segments of the population,

they're disadvantaged, underprivileged, low income,

stay in very remote areas or in rural parts of the country, at least in India,

which are very underdeveloped in terms of just infrastructure, so on.

So microfinance is provided, at least in India.

It's built upon what we call the self-help group model.

The self-help group is just a small group of people in, say, a village.

They have built a sort of infrastructure where

all of them form of a kind of non profits group where

the objective is that they are going to receive loans from

microfinance institution that works inside district.

And therefore goes to every village and sees if there is a self-help group and

then the microfinance institution will channel money, loans,

etc., to the self-help group, not to an individual.

Because an individual who is poor and does not have enough collaterals.

Is unfortunately not a very viable entity to lend money to.

But it's a self-help group, because it's a group and

there's a lot of group pressure on every individual member to

return the money to not default, etc., social pressure.

Therefore, it makes it a much more viable proposition for

a microfinance institution to come and lend to that entire group.

So the self-help groups, they're sort of built from the grassroots.

It is a grassroots movement.

So far so good.

Now, there are some folks who are consist of members

who are largely illiterate or functionally literate.

Which according to the government of India is somebody who can count basic numbers,

can sign instead of sort of having the fingerprint kind of signature module,

they can sign and they can read simple sentences.

Now, definition of simplicity or that is but

nevertheless, you get the point, someone who can do a little bit of reading and

writing in that look line which is called functionally illiterate.

So these groups would mostly be,

they were consist of members who are completely illiterate,

the people ran the group would be functionally illiterate.

And the other interesting thing we found is we spend months in a rural

area staying in the village in order to really understand how this

group function, and they got familiar with us, with the team.

In doing that we also realized that,

there was a certain kind of person who was often used as

the person who documented the transaction that happened.

Very important who was given the money,

who returned how much of that money all of those things.

Because largely they were illiterate, so the children, so,

sometimes they would be a ten year old boy.

He would play this very important role because he could read and

write, so he would be the person who would document everything and

he would be paid like 20 cents a month [LAUGH] to do that but

that's a lot of money for that little kid in that little village so

that's how these would operate.

The challenge is that because it's getting and

because there is no system to really be very sure of

what is being recorded and it's also in sort of format of course

which sometimes it gets destroyed, they lose stuff, all of that happens.

So the microfinance institutions have a little bit of a challenge in

really being sure of what happened to the money that was given last year.

How as they monitor it.

It's a difficult proposition.

And for somebody from the micro finance institution to travel to remote areas,

to be able to actually go there and

see all the documentation that's on paper, and make sense of it and the do,

in someway capture all that and bring it back to wherever the MFI is located,

the central place where the computing systems are located.

All of this becomes difficult, expensive and hence most of the time,

and advice kind of see going to really small villages and

working with small self help groups in really remote or small very rural areas.

Is not a very sustainable.

And so what we wanted to do is to look at how could one create a system

that would make microfinance accessible to the most remote areas,

to the most rural populations without somebody having to travel there.

Could everything be documented and

sent without a manual of somebody coming or somebody going, etc, etc.

So that was the problem we set out to investigate.

And what we found as we went to trouble fees,

state of the villages and understood the bar equations.

Interestingly most of themselves have groups aligned with them.

So the women are the ones, they form the group, they're very responsible about

making sure the money that's being led, the person who is supposed

to give back a certain installment on this date in this month that happens.

If they feel that that woman's husband is.

Is alcoholic and he's drunk and he's wasting the money then all the women in

the group will come together to see how they can help this woman save enough money

to give back to the because

the women know that if they have to then those sirs and

madam's who come from that MFI they will not be very happy, and maybe

next time they'll not able to get loan as big amount as much they got this time.

So it is very run by all of this decisions all need by women,

groups are run by women.

So that also the very interesting set of experience that we had then

I have to say while we doing the study, we would be in the villages and

the research team would always be given this chairs,

they say we are still in sort of furniture, to sit even if is

out in the village square which is an App.

That kind of floor.

But there you are, sitting on the chairs.

And everybody else is there all watching on the ground.

I was very uncomfortable in the beginning, because it was such an unequal setup.

How do you have this conversation?

But you know gradually we realize as we stay there,

as we can visiting them, suddenly at one point there were no chairs.

>> [LAUGH] >> We

were invited to sit on the floor also.

So you know we knew that, okay.

Now it's, now we'll get someone with our discussions,

the challenge was the of course and what could we design?

What kind of software system could we design that

could be used by this contravention?

And the illiteracy would not be an impediment.

And that is what we did many variations and

one of the things that I'll talk about, which we felt very excited, is we would

be with, as we visit different villages and different parts of the country etc.

One of the things we heard from them is that, you know,

even if he can't read text and alphabets all are able with numbers.

We can do calculations without a problem.

We recognize numbers and when we see that ledger book,

we can recognize where our name appears, even though we can't read the name.

But we can read the number, and we know the number in the format.

Quenching relevant, whichever rule is that person's entry.

They know that because of the number.

So they don't exactly where details about

whatever they have taken in rebate and all that.

And they know which caller, especially with the numbers.

So the numbers.

So very excited.

Okay.

May be you've cracked it.

So what we're going to do is be able to use

numbers to create a navigational paradigm.

I mean move away from labels and all text labels obviously they would

be to research, so we use, what used to b known as Lotus 1-2-3.

You use numbers as a shortcut mechanism to repeat and

drill down deeper down the menu structure.

And so, okay, it stops, did a lot of quick prototyping, and

did a lot of participatory design.

So we would go there, and we would be sitting on the ground, we would have,

you know our computers, and we would have prototype something, and

then we would get the women together and need all, look at it and

we would then see what they have to say.

What is the first impression,and then we would tell them to do something with it.

So in that process you are completely wrong

about the numeric interface idea and why?

Because we found that wide numeric values as data.

Was very very comprehended.

But numerical representation of action and navigation did not work at all.

So it was leveraging

numeric literacy to allow for simple method of navigation.

It just dinged the associations between concepts and

abstract sort off numeric identifiers.

So we switched.

We were very sad, because those designers he thought, we found a new

way that we can deal with any kind of challenges

if it's a challenge about language electricity etc but it just didn't work.

So what would work was really representation [INAUDIBLE].

And really representing the task very very clearly.

Not abstract but very clearly.

That worked well and we did something else even what

we did is we called it an iconic legend.So we found

back in the element the groups learned these elements,

the icons,the etc, we want them faster when they asked us,

and we clearly gave them an audio description we verbally told them.

This is what it is, they asked us another time, this is what it is and

they learned and they told each other, and so it is very quick.

So now what we did is only interface we had a feature called Iconic Ledgers.

There we had all these icons that were there on that interface.

And each one had audio feedback.

So they could just click on the icons.

>> Mm-hm.

>> And they would hear what it is.

And it would also demonstrate what it does.

Mm-hm!

>> And we found that worked so well, they'll launched it so well.

And they felt much less inhibitive to then try that feature out.

You get actually a little bit.

So this were some of the things that should work finally.

And what we did, we also found Color.

They were very quick to recognize

few color cues just the way they used it in their paper letter.

So red with always and a q for the folders.

So without they didn't have to know who.

They just knew the moment you saw where in the sequence of the table.

A person's name continues the next person because he is in a certain sequence and

certain number.

If it goes red, then you'll be in default.

So we use those cue of colors that they're familiar with.

>> Mm-hm.

>> And that helped a lot.

Now.

What we finally decided and this is something this work continued.

And you should definitely look up Dr. Tappan Parikh's work.

He was in the University of Washington at that time when he came and

he was working on this research project with me, Labs and with us.

And then he went back, and he was the primary sort of

mover in terms of the technology that was finally used.

What he created at the end of this project and when we realized,

we had to keep the paper artifacts, and combine technology with it.

The paper artifacts were critical if this was going to succeed because

they were very, they had so

much familiarity and trust of these paper artifacts that was shared.

So everybody could pass that paper, record book, or ledger,

from one to the other, it went there, they opened it.

Whether they read or not, they felt familiar knowing, here I am.

This is the row where I am.

And I'm in green, I'm not in red, and so and so.

So all of that, sharing that, keeping it with one of them.

All of these things were very important for them.

And so we knew that we had to keep that.

So what Tappan finally did was he came up with a system which he called Cam.

And Cam was because of the important role the camera in the mobile

phone actually played in this particular system that he designed,

and subsequently it's used for many others such projects.

So what this did with that it had an application which you could use it for

entering and processing data at the microfinance institutional end.

But, on the field, for the self-help groups,

they could use the camera in the phone to scan, to take photos,

document, any of the transactions which were

handwritten in the ledger, and to then be able to send it.

To collect, all of that was archived and then sent to the microfinance institution.

And so Tappan created documentation,

I mean paper ledgers which included a bar code based system.

So whether it was loan applications,

receipts, other documents, everything was printed with an identification bar code.

So now the Cam software enabled the mobile phone camera to scan that code,

identify what the document is, take a photograph,

process what data came with that document, what transactions were there, etc.

And associate that data that came with that document with that barcode,

and then it was sent off to the MFI system.

And so now there was this whole flow that was created between this small village,

this informal way that they were recording things,

to the big city where the main computing system was located.

And this created, to me this created the sort of the sustainability

of the idea that self-help groups could document things.

And that could be a stable, cost effective system for the MFIs to use that data,

and track and then everybody benefited of, that's the intention.

That the self-help group, then because all the documentation is always

submitted in time and is there with the MFIs, it can analyze that data.

And the self-help groups can get better, more loans,

depending on how well they've done, have they not defaulted, etc.

They can negotiate better rates, so on and so forth.

So that was the final system, the hybrid system that was designed for

microfinance institutions.

>> It almost seems like bringing big data to very small groups.

And that suddenly one of the big challenges is the original microfinance

sort of depended on the fact that the group would manage things, but

it looked at the group as a group.

It didn't have visibility into the individual transactions and now,

when you have visibility into those transactions, you can do analyses of them.

You can identify potential problems before they occur.

Obviously, that's not just good, they're risks there that

the MFIs might over interpret things without the local context,

but it's an interesting solution.

This seems like it fits in

a whole stream of work that businesses, as well as NGOs

are trying to do in these particularly rural, low-literacy areas.

I know I've talked with folks at Unilever that were interested

in finding ways to make a local home into a distributor that

could get products to people by developing systems that didn't

require the customers to have a significant literacy level.

But that would create a local market where you could order things,

and they would be delivered to.

I expect this is probably a pretty common pattern in India.

>> Right, and that whole Unilever model, those women were called Shakti Ammas,

Shakti is power, and Amma is mom, is mother.

And it became again, it became quite a case study.

You know how successful that was and how it transformed the entire,

sort of the empowerment of women in these rural areas,

largely rural, but also very sort of smaller urban areas, etc.

And it was fascinating to see some of the films that have been made on that.

And how individuals, who became these distributors in Shakti Ammas,

how they became very different people.

And how they had transformed a lot of things.

Disease, occurrence of disease, infant mortality,

the figures became better, disease control was better, because these Shakti Ammas

became these major, sort of, empowered women, who knew what the problems were.

And they also used a lot of Unilever products,

whether it was the oral hydration when there are these

sort of gastro intestinal diseases etc.

So, all of that happened because of that model.

And yeah, so there's a lot of that happening at least in India for sure.

I'm sure in other countries too.

>> And I think it also just reminds us that, yeah, particularly those of us who

are older in the field tend to think of computers as things that compute.

But these days that computer is so much about these other functionalities,

about storage and archiving and communication and

you didn't have to do very much obvious computing.

It wasn't about doing the addition, subtraction and ledger,

it was about how do we photocopy this and scan it and transmit it.

Yeah, they can do computing in the backend, but for

the folks in the village what mattered is that they suddenly had a fax machine.

[LAUGH] >> Exactly, exactly, and Tappan often said

that I think a lot of his colleagues, back in the computer science department said,

but shouldn't you just eliminate the paper altogether, it makes no sense.

Why would you keep the paper there?

I mean, the whole idea is that you you need to make it much more efficient, and

get rid of the paper, and he was like, no, that's not what it is about.

I think you are absolutely right.

>> Yes, as somebody who remembers growing up with a passbook for my bank.

I always wondered if I just typed in a number there and came in,

would they gave me that amount of money?

But of course they had records.

But the passbook made it tangible, it made it trustworthy.

And clearly there's a whole bunch of people who if they see something with

their signature, their handwriting and an amount, they'll believe it.

And if they just see that a phone screen says you owe a certain amount of money,

that's not very trustworthy.

>> That's right, yeah, exactly, exactly right, yeah.

>> So, well, wonderful.

Well, thank you for sharing this interesting design case with us.

We're delighted to have you with us again.

And I will remind everybody that this was Apala Chavan from

Human Factors International.

This has been a design case on supporting low-literacy financial

self-help groups in India.

And we'll see you next time.

Supporting Low-Literacy Self-Help (Interview with Apala Chavan)

Prototyping and Design

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