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Analysis workshop: Building Credibility in the Evidence
At the Analysis workshop in Milan, attended by the larger group of senior NMB stakeholders as well as the members of the research team, the EPAM Continuum team. With the help of the NMB employees who had attended particular interviews and could speak to what they learned from the respondent, the attendees discussed notable observations and learnings that had been gathered from each individual respondent. This not only transferred the knowledge that was in the heads of those who were in the field into the heads of other attendees, but also placed the presenting attendees from NMB on a pedestal of expertise, as they were able to speak firsthand about the in-home and in-business interviews they attended, further buying both them and their NMB audience members into the human-centered design process’s “way of knowing” based upon firsthand human experience. To help with this process, NMB and EPAM Continuum team members presenting about the key takeaways of different interviews, and referred to print-outs of the interview debriefings pinned to the walls.
The EPAM Continuum team and Cabezas co-presented nine themes to the attendees from NMB, with each theme focusing upon a different observation from the field—from how microloan customers were (informally) using new digital channels like Whatsapp to gather the documents needed for a loan application and send them to NMB loan officers, to the many different informal workarounds people used to keep track of the repayments they had made to NMB and the total number of repayments remaining, to the different means people used to help themselves save each month and repay their microloans on time.
The second day began with an open-ended conversation around the nine themes, with the NMB attendees going around the table and talking about which themes they most strongly believed in, and which ones they were more skeptical of. From there, the NMB/EPAM Continuum team guided the NMB attendees through a handful of different potential offerings that could be prototyped and tested in the Envisioning and Prototyping phase, along with how the different prototyped offerings would connect to the different themes.
By connecting particular themes to the various proposed ways of prototyping offerings in the following phase, the senior NMB attendees could speak to which prototyped offerings they felt most comfortable bringing to life from an organizational capability perspective. This was critical to the EPAM Continuum team’s goal of setting the project up for the highest chance of success after their direct involvement ended. The EPAM Continuum team made the conversation around feasibility and logic for pursuing a particular prototype both open and participatory. The goal was to create an atmosphere where the various senior NMB stakeholders in attendance would feel able to ask for any support and resources necessary from colleagues or superiors to make the project a reality if they were tasked with implementing part of it. This would increase the likelihood of successfully scaling the project from a prototype to an in-market offering following the Prototyping phase. From his past experience, EPAM Continuum’s Bianchini shared that letting the stakeholders who would potentially be taking control of the project down the road voice their opinions on the prototype’s feasibility was a critical component of the project’s eventual success. By having say over what could be the beginning of a new product or service, NMB stakeholders would feel both more accountable and in greater control of the project outcome knowing they would eventually be taking responsibility for it.
At the conclusion of the workshop, the EPAM Continuum team presented attendees with copies of a full-color, printed, and bound book of all of the interview debriefings from the generative phase of research, summaries of the nine themes bubbled up from those interviews, and a collection of photographs from the field that documented the team’s process and approach. The printed book was important for the senior NMB stakeholder attendees to carry back physical evidence of both the workshop and the project to date. By creating an inherently sharable object to present to their teams, they would be the de facto experts about—and advocates for—the past and future of the work. The EPAM Continuum team felt the book would also play an important role both for NMB’s General Manager, who sought physical evidence (in the form of “something to put on [his] desk”) about NMB’s ability to listen to and design for customers. Finally, EPAM Continuum held on to several copies of the book to pass along to other key stakeholders so they could have evidence of the process they were involved in and feel more invested in the outcome, in particular the project’s partners at the Central Bank of Jordan and USAID (for whom the book would be a compelling physical piece of evidence for responsibly-spent funding).
CORE SOLUTION: E-HASSALAH
The solution the senior NMB stakeholders aligned upon with the EPAM Continuum team in the Analysis workshop was to experiment with a mixed digital/analog service that would afford two new types of flexibility to NMB’s microloan customers.
The first type of flexibility was the physical location where NMB’s microloan customers physically repaid their loans. The prototype service that NMB/EPAM Continuum wanted to test in the Envisioning phase would enable NMB customers to repay their loans at the shops of trusted local merchants in their community, rather than having to arrange costly travel to a bank branch to make their repayments.
The second type of flexibility would be how microloan customers repaid their loans. Rather than limiting clients to repaying their full repayment amount on (or before) the day their monthly repayment was due, the prototype would simulate allowing respondents to make smaller repayments at a pace similar to how they would put money into a hassalah to save it: a small amount each day. The prototyped service would enable customers to repay in whatever denominations they chose over the course of a month rather than in one lump sum (as long as their cumulative small repayments added up to be the full repayment amount).
The research team saw these two flexibilities as interdependent. Individually, they were certainly novel service features for any microfinance bank, but together, the team believed they mutually re-enforced one another to make a truly novel service that could make the lives of NMB’s microloan customers significantly easier, and make NMB’s microloan offering significantly more attractive as compared to its competitors.
At the heart of the digital component of the prototyped service, and the enabler of these two types of flexibility, was the cultural affordance of the ‘e-hassalah’ As microloan customers made multiple small repayments on their microloan over the course of the month, the sum of the repayments they had made to date for that month since the last repayment would be reflected in their e-hassalah—an in-app visualization of a hassalah accompanied by graphs showing their previous months’ successful repayment, and their progress towards repaying their full amount for this month. The team felt the e-hassalah feature would help meet the needs that multiple respondents raised throughout the initial round of generative interviews:
“If I could make smaller repayments two or three times a month, it would make me feel like repayment was in easier reach… maybe I could more easily share the burden of repayment with my parents.”—Aseel, 20, F, student
“I think if someone has repaid as many loans as I have, the bank should let you choose how you want to divide your monthly repayments up over the course of a month… paying all at once is a big burden.”—Bilal, 35, shopkeeper
ENVISIONING & PROTOTYPING: DESIGNING A SERVICE, PRESENTING EVIDENCE
Prototyping Interview Process
For the final stage of the project, Envisioning and Prototyping, the team agreed that it would be critically important to understand the proposed service from the perspective of both “users” and “providers”—in this case, both microloan customers with loans to repay, and the trusted local merchants who would be accepting those customers’ repayments. To understand about what respondents liked about the prototype and what needed to change, the team planned on recruiting for and running twelve evaluative service prototype interviews, where they would interview a total of four local merchants (two urban and two rural), and speak with two loan customers at each of the four shops.
The team started by reaching out to bank branches in a both urban and rural areas to seek out local merchants with whom the local branch had particularly close relationships. The research team first interviewed the merchants, having one of the NMB team members, Saif Al Khalili, pretend to be a microloan customer coming in to make a repayment at their store using the new service. As NMB’s Al Khalili stood on one side of the counter holding a phone that had been loaded with the “customer-facing” digital wireframes, Hyman and Zoumot would be standing on the other side of the counter next to the merchant, guiding them through the “merchant-facing” digital wireframes, as Cabezas and Bianchini supported with note-taking and video-recording. Both customer- and merchant-facing wireframes had been programmed into older-model iPhones dedicated to prototyping.
Figure 6. Prototyping components, clockwise from top left; physical paper receipt to gauge receptivity towards physical versus digital receipts, physical sign made of foamcore identifying store as an official “NMB repayment point”, paper prototype created for feature phone users, digital wireframes made displayed on a prototyping phone using InVision for smartphone users. Image © EPAM Continuum, used with permission.
After testing the prototype with each merchant and gathering feedback about what they liked and would want to change about the service, the NMB/EPAM Continuum team built enough trust and rapport with the merchant for them to be comfortable with having the team ‘take over’ their store for the several hours needed to run the set of subsequent customer interviews.
For the pair of customer interviews that followed each merchant interview, an NMB microloan customer would simulate the journey of traveling to the merchant’s store, where the interview would start with collecting feedback on the sign greeting them outside of the shop, identifying it as an NMB Microloan Repayment Point. In the initial round of generative interviews, the NMB/EPAM Continuum team asked in depth questions about what would make it easier for respondents to trust a given service, and the answer came in the form of official-looking signage or stickers that made it clear that a given store was an officially sanctioned provider of a given service.
By prototyping the service in a way that would resemble reality as closely as possible, the team understood what users liked and disliked about the service as it could appear in the future. To accomplish as life-like a prototype as possible required the analog and digital components of the service to be of equal fidelity (and credibility). The goal was to have merchants and customers believe that the service was ‘real’ enough to believe it could actually exist, but still in a form where they would feel comfortable giving suggestions and sharing candid feedback on how it could be improved.
After sharing their opinions on the several examples of official-looking signage, the microloan customer would be standing in front of the merchant’s counter inside, where they would be handed the iPhone with the customer-facing set of wireframes. From that point, the remainder of the interview would consist of Zoumot and Hyman guiding the microloan customer through the prototyped repayment process, continually collecting feedback and gauging their level of comfort with the process. Throughout the prototype interview, the “merchant” the microloan customer would be speaking with was actually Al Khalili, the NMB employee who was pretending to be another merchant working in the store and sharing the space behind the counter (sometimes a comically small amount of space) with the store’s actual proprietor. As Zoumot and Hyman helped guide the customer through the prototype’s wireframes, Al Khalili would be navigating in parallel through the merchant-facing wireframes, right down to the moment of when the microloan customer actually ‘repaid’ the loan by handing Al Khalili some play Jordanian currency that the customer had received at the start of the interview. The prototyping interview concluded with Al Khalili handing the client a mockup of a physical paper receipt that reflected the repayment that they had just made, while a digital copy of the very same receipt automatically appeared in the prototype’s screen. The final part of the microloan customer interview sought to understand from customers whether both a physical and digital receipt were necessary, and if not, why the client would be sufficiently comfortable with just one of the two.
For the backstage of this e-hassalah-centric service, the research team calculated that several times per month, a local NMB branch would dispatch an employee to a designated neighborhood in their territory to collect the money that the neighborhood’s microloan customers had repaid to the merchants in the community whose shops were certified as official repayment points. After double-checking on the amount collected back at the NMB branch, the neighborhood’s microloan customers’ balances would be updated accordingly in each of their files based upon the amount they repaid, all without microloan customers needing to travel to the branch and stand in line to repay (or trust someone else to do so on their behalf).
Final Presentation and Hand-off
Following the Envisioning phase, the EPAM Continuum team was set to make their final presentation to the leadership of NMB, as well as delegates from the Central Bank of Jordan and USAID over the course of an hour-long meeting. To most compellingly share with them the evidence around the prototype that was gathered during testing, EPAM Continuum and NMB agreed that it would be important to show both merchants and microloan customers “speaking their own truths” as evidence of how they felt about the prototype. EPAM Continuum’s Bianchini cut together a highlight reel showing both merchants and customers talking about what they admired about the prototyped service, and why they were excited to see it become a reality. To give the audience a glimpse into the mechanics of the prototype in a more approachable way than just sharing static wireframes, EPAM Continuum’s Hyman used Apple Keynote to develop a narrated walkthrough of the wireframes, showing both the customer- and merchant-facing digital wireframes suspended against a changing background of photographs taken during testing, and accompanied by a narration the app’s key features and explaining how they were tested with actual merchants and NMB microloan customers.
Following a successful presentation to both the extended team of stakeholders and NMB’s Board of Directors, the EPAM Continuum team spent the day working alongside the NMB core team to align upon the project’s implementation. While the original RfP that NMB shared requested that the responding bid include the full-fidelity development of all of the new service’s digital and physical touchpoints, EPAM Continuum team members advocated for a different approach; if EPAM Continuum led the development of the app from their headquarters in Boston, the process would risk being expensive, time-consuming, and not the most efficient use of NMB’s or EPAM Continuum’s resources. Instead, the EPAM Continuum team proposed to help NMB write a separate, additional RfP to distribute to local software development companies. By having a local Jordanian company collaborating with NMB to code and implement the full-fidelity version of the service’s digital touchpoints, the costs to NMB would be far lower, and any questions the software company had about the development process could be answered quickly and in-person.
On their final days in Jordan, the EPAM Continuum team worked closely with NMB to develop User Stories and a detailed work plan to help better guide and inform the local software developers who would be responding to NMB’s technical RfP, which was co-written with guidance from EPAM Continuum. NMB eventually chose to work with a Jordan-based software developer with a track record of developing digital services for several other major financial institutions in Jordan.
IMPLEMENTATION AND OUTCOMES
In April of 2018, NMB released a digital app that enabled customers to repay their microloans in a more flexible way by letting them choose the amount of money they paid out of the app’s associated e-wallet. NMB partnered with the Central Bank of Jordan to integrate the NMB app with the Central Bank’s “Mahfazti e-wallet,” a system developed by the Central Bank and run by the mobile network operator Umniah. Although technically enabling microloan customers to repay their loans remotely using their phone, the service requires the microloan customer to have first placed money into a Mahfazti e-wallet account, which can be done by visiting a participating local Umniah mobile vendor.
While the local software development company chose not to draw upon the cultural affordance of the e-hassalah, and NMB has not yet fully scaled the ability for customers to pay in cash at a local merchant and have that amount be considered in the same way as making a repayment at an NMB branch, the current service is a strong middle step along the way through enabling gradual repayment by paying money out of the Mahfazti e-wallet. Released in the spring of 2018, the Android version of the app (Android is the dominant mobile operating system amongst NMB’s customers) has been downloaded more than 1,000 times in the first three months it was on the market.
Multiple features of the app in its current form can be traced back to the evidence that the NMB/EPAM Continuum research team uncovered in the field and presented to the extended NMB team during the Analysis workshop. Informed by the findings of how customers struggled and improvised to keep track of their loans, the app lets users seeing both their total amount repaid on their current loan, as well as number of remaining repayments (both pieces of information that the research team heard respondents wish they had at their fingertips over the course of their field research). The app also presents NMB customers with a log of digital receipts that show all of their past successful payments, creating a “digital paper trail” to assuage the fear that some respondents in NMB/EPAM Continuum’s generative research shared, which was that money could ‘disappear’ within their smartphone without a trace. NMB’s service also lets users apply for a new microloan by using their phone to submit key documents and information, instead of forcing them to bring in physical copies of the documents (or informally use text messages to submit documents to NMB’s local branch employees, which the research team heard some respondents tell they did). These features, based upon the ethnographic data that the research team shared with NMB stakeholders throughout the process, speaks to the potential impact of the right form of evidence presented in the right way—even within organizations that haven’t previously relied upon the use of ethnography to understand and design for their customers.
Zach Hyman is a Design Strategist at EPAM Continuum who has previously worked across China, Myanmar/Burma, Jordan, Italy, Viet Nam, Thailand, Denmark, England, and the US designing both products and services for retail, IoT, healthcare, transportation, and education. He conducted Fulbright research into resource-constrained creativity across China, and blogs at SquareInchAnthro.com
NOTES
Support for EPAM Continuum’s engagement with the National Microfinance Bank of Jordan was generously provided by the United States Agency for International Development through their Jordan LENS Local Enterprise Support Project. This case study does not represent the official position of EPAM Continuum, USAID, or the National Microfinance Bank of Jordan.
2018 Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference Proceedings, pp. 381–404, ISSN 1559-8918
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