When you’re working with customers who are miles apart from you, limited to very simple communication networks (i.e. nowhere close to high-tech videoconferencing) and don’t even speak their language, how can you accurately claim that the work you’re doing is human-centered?

Making sure that we understood our customers’ needs at every step of the way was a significant challenge for us, but one that we thought was crucial. We discovered that making prototypes, both here and in Myanmar, was the best way to communicate our ideas to our partners and listen to their ideas in return.

Showing prototypes to our customers helped them tell us what they wanted. When we originally asked what kinds of improvements they needed on their three-brick stoves, we rarely got any definite answers. These women had been cooking on an open flame for centuries, and they had developed all kinds of “workarounds” to make full use of the technology; it was often hard for them to articulate what they wanted to change. Setting our prototype in front of them gave them something to evaluate, and opened up the conversation about which features supported or conflicted with their culture of cooking.

Not counting low-resolution prototypes and partial ones, we’ve made about 16 working prototypes of our stove thus far. Typically, we come up with a revision to the design, draw up some plans and explain how to make it, and our partner builds a prototype in-country. They then tell us what they discovered from making the prototype, what changes they suggest, and what customers have said about it. We take their feedback, prototype their design ourselves, and make revisions. This constant iteration helps us make sure that we are attuned to our customers’ needs at every step, even if we can’t be close to them always.

Tags: distance, iteration, prototypes, user-centered design

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 25th, 2009 at 1:43 pm and is filed under Our Design Philosophy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.