“Box” vs. “Bucket”
During our trip to Myanmar last year, our team created a set of cook stove prototypes that rural women could try out in their cooking spaces. We created two prototypes–one box-shaped and one bucket-shaped–that we took to women and asked them to compare. We asked them: do you prefer the box or the bucket stove and why? Which one would you prefer to use and why? What does a bucket stove make you think about? Have you seen something like this before?
We expected to hear comments like “The bucket stove is a little too tall. The box stove is compact.” But instead, the first woman we took them to immediately remarked, “I would pay $10 for that box stove but only $2 for that bucket stove. When I go to the local market, I see bucket stoves and they’re typically associated with poor quality metal. This box stove, it is something new. I think I will try it!”
While both stoves were made out of the same material and cost about the same to manufacture (~$3-$3.50), she thought the bucket stove looked cheap and would break quickly. To you or me, that might be a turnoff, but to someone living on less than $2 a day, it’s a deal-breaker. In other words, we could have made the most fuel-efficient, safe, and usable bucket stove, but it still wouldn’t have sold because it looked cheap! On the other hand, the box stove excited her and triggered her curiosity because it was something new.
This interview reminded us that when designing for the developing world, it’s still important to create irresistibly cool products that people will want to own and use. To understand what makes a product cool or uncool for our user, we must be mindful that coolness changes across cultures, genders, and user groups. Our challenge is to stay true to creating an affordable product by discovering small modifications (i.e. box vs. bucket) that will get users to want our product without adding too much to its cost.
Tags: cultural insights, listening, prototypes, user-centered design
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May 14th, 2010 at 7:45 am
[...] alien to them. This is why we’ve developed a stove that’s more efficient and which looks high tech, but that fits pretty seamlessly into the existing cooking [...]