UX research and ethnographic design for humanitarian technology.

UX research and ethnographic design for humanitarian technology.

Welcome to this in-depth look at UX research and ethnographic design approach for humanitarian technology.

I’ll be covering two specific projects, one that was research only where the end ‘product’ was a discovery and a university modules/guidance/reporting on peace and technology and another project where the research and fieldwork was centred around a minimum viable product (MVP) and inputted into the second iteration of the product.

I’ll also be offering general tips and advice for undertaking UX research or ‘field work’ in a country or community that isn’t one of your origin or comfort.

Content warnings.

Violence against women, the Manchester arena bombing, radicalisation of youth and terrorism, natural disasters, colonisation, racism, education/ social status prejudice. Some slides will have ‘No photos/copies please’. Please do not take photos/copies of these slides.

Intro slide for speaker Eriol

Introduction to Eriol (speaker)

Hi, I’m Eriol. (Ehh-roll).

I’m humanitarian designer or a human rights centred designer. They/Them pronouns.

10 years in digital product design & UX. 7+ year in community development work.

Intro slide for workplace Ushahidi

The content of this talk is from when I worked at Ushahidi. Ushahidi is a Kenyan based, NGO that makes Open Source humanitarian technology for human rights needs.

Ushahidi was founded in 2007/2008 during election turmoil in Kenya.

Ushahidi’s tech tools are most commonly used for citizen led advocacy work, anti-corruption and accountability, disaster response, citizen empowerment, election monitoring, human-rights abuse reporting.

NGO language

First off, you may have heard terms like ‘Developing countries’ and ‘the global south’ when engaging with humanitarian work.

The names and labels for ‘other places’ are vast and often confusing.

There is no perfect language here. But this is one of the first leanings you’ll have in humanitarian work. The jargon that is used.

Isooko. Peace Building + Tech.

The first project I’ll reference is Isooko, which means ‘fountain of peace’ in KinyaRwanda, one of Rwanda’s national languages.

Isooko is a EU funded consortium project undertaken by universities, non-profits and companies it’s aim is…

Organisations involved: KCL, UNI of Makerere, DotSoft, Leiden Uni, Aegis Trust, Kigali Collaborative Research Centre.

Isooko’s aim

(Isooko) To explore the potential of digital technologies to support peace through testing and development in Rwanda and Kenya. Over the period over 3 years.

You can find more info at isooko.eu

Dispatcher. Crisis Response + Tech.

The second project, Dispatcher, was shorter with a MVP product focus. Over 6 months.

Dispatcher’s aim

Dispatchers aim was to discover whether technology help people create and maintain resilience in times of crisis? and What kinds of technology aids rather than overwhelms?

We were looking at community cohesion and how people globally help each other in response to a crisis. This is linked to an idea of resilience in both an individual way and a group way.

Why Rwanda and Kenya?

So, why Rwanda and Kenya. Though it may feel like a ‘given’ to be doing humanitarian work in these places, It’s important to understand and explore why you’re doing work in a specific location.

Rwanda’s history with Genocide led to a number of social policies and projects that worked on peace and Kenya’s history of tribal/political conflict allow exploration into crisis.

But when you’re looking at where to conduct your research ask yourself these questions:

‘Why is this the country and/or city I want to investigate this problem in?’

What can I learn from the community here that I might find more difficult in my country of residence?

What unique problems am I committing to solve by researching here?

Even if you’re likely to be conduct the research in your country/community of origin or comfort this is good practice.

Grant funded activity is…

Even though Rwanda and Kenya are legitimately the best places to conduct this study, grant funding often stipulates in the proposal phase where the research ‘should’ happen and most humanitarian work is funded through grants.

This often restricts the opportunity to discover other locations where research could be done to unless there is further funding or a partner organisation in this ‘other location’

I would often find myself doing research on multiple projects continuously as I visited places that have relevance. For example, I did this kind of ‘satellite research’ for Isooko when visiting Kazakstan, Tunisia and Romania for other projects.

Academia ≠ Practice

Another tricky thing with funded humanitarian work when academia is involved is that the methodologies you use can be restrictive.

As practitioners, we often use the methods that will gain us the pathways and results we are interested in exploring whereas academia is also testing the methodological relevancy.

Design Academics and practitioners notably have different needs from research. Academics need to be able to record detail and ‘code’ the results for papers and practitioners tend to be focussed on the insight and artefacts of research.

I’ve had many a heated debate with academic partners about the essential flexibility needed with methodologies.

Living Labs Methodology.

For Isooko we used something called ‘Living Labs’ This diagram illustrates the intention of Living labs methodology well. It sits closely with a participatory design approach which matched Ushahidi’s mission reasonably well.

In Dispatcher we didn’t have academia involved and therefore we were able to play with how we approached our research.

Public + Civil Society Orgs

Civil society organisations or CSO’s are an integral stakeholder of ‘Peace’ and therefore a key group to include in our research.

However, from previous experience a team member flagged that CSO’s will have different needs and expectations than the general public.

This would be in relation to the content as well as format and in order to attend and benefit, we needed to offer them more value beyond simply participation in workshops.

‘Public’

For the academic portion of the UX research, we were ‘required’ to do some activities but we decided to omit one activity as well as to adapt other activities to be more engaging and relevant to the attendees.

For public we did User Journeys. Personas. Stakeholder mapping. Rapid prototyping.

But not User Scenarios.

‘CSO’

With CSO’s we really focussed in on sharing what we had learned from the public and offered the value of the initial public research and worked with them to understand how this had been achieved and then further enveloping their experience with that of the public.

We spent the entire morning taking them through the ‘public’ user journeys and personas in order to connect with the people that they serve. This enabled them to build empathy and critically analyse their current peace building activities and rapid prototype from a technology perspective much more easily.

Flexibility within boundaries.

Even though academic boundaries were in place we needed to understand the value of flexibility.

We adapted the persona activity after witnessing a mistake on our part. The public, were less comfortable with long form writing in their second or third language.

We changed it to an interview process for the second public workshop and this both built rapport among the group and also allowed for discussion on deeper persona topics.

‘Aid’ Language.

Something to be aware of when working with populations that have been influenced by ‘receiving aid’, these participants are ‘non-profit’ language proficient and in my experience, use certain language and phrases with ‘researchers’ (especially those from ‘the west’) to appear ‘fundable’.

Be aware and sympathetic of this when working in developing countries.

Working with trauma.

Working preemptively with trauma will help you when you are confronted by these subjects.

I anticipated this when planning the research for both Isooko and Dispatcher.

Working with trauma in design activities.

One of the public groups we worked with were Polycom women, a group of women across generations and backgrounds dedicated to peace building in Kibera (which is an informal settlement or ‘slum’ in central Nairobi, Kenya) Kibera has a lot of political, social, economical issues.

Working with Polycom and the other attendees at these workshops around peace was one of the first times I was confronted with my own personal experiences and relationship with trauma as well as other peoples and how to manage that in a research context.

They were asked to do a journey map exercise of a crisis. Some of the attendees talking about when they were kidnapped, robbed, witnessed gender based violence, tribal violence and political violence. One of the Polycom women spoke in detail about a peaceful protest activity that ended in injury as they were stoned by the public for being ‘outspoken’

User journey map example

Here’s an example of a journey map from a participant. It’s separated into before the incident, during the incident and after the incident.

User journey map example - close up

On close up, you can see elements from the participant/s listing events like ‘war’ ‘tribal conflict’ ‘high food prices’ and ‘sound of bullets’

I’m not sure about you but I struggled to truly understand these circumstances and how to respond as a researcher.

My journey map - Manchester bombing

One of the reasons we were able to work with this well was the attention we paid to trauma in our planning.

Here’s my own journey map I created as an example to the workshop of my ‘experience’ with the Manchester arena bombing at the Ariana Grande concert.

Homework*

Think of a deeply upsetting event in your life and try to begin to ‘Journey map’ this event.

• Very optional homework

So, if you can try this out.

Think of a deeply upsetting event in your life and try to begin to ‘Journey map’ this event.

https://www.nngroup.com/articles/journey-mapping-101/

I recommend this to begin to understand your responses to difficult subject matter and the commodification of that into design ‘artefacts’

How did we make sure we did this ethically?

But what were the other ways we ensured that what we did was as ethical as possible.

This is what we put in place: ~ Researchers went through the same process ~ Researchers examples built a compassionate connect ~ Attendees notified pre-workshop of subject matter ~ Psychological support on site ~ Confidentiality ~ Researchers were supported post-workshop

Schooling your reaction

Something to practice as a researcher is your physical and emotional reactions to what participants tell you or how they react.

When in session with this person we talked about what poverty is and the differences between ‘UK/western poverty’ and ‘Kenyan poverty’ Poverty and the class system are different in different places and you should be ready to understand and listen to those differences and battle any biased/ill-informed reactions and opinions you might have.

Surprising subjects can arise.

Many subjects come into play when conducting research: History, culture, politics, poverty. When you’re doing work in countries that are not yours by origin, many difficult topics can arise during your research conversations, especially if you’re doing work in behalf of a non-profit.

Because I’m white with a UK accent there is inherent historical context around colonisation when doing work in countries that are former colonies of the UK. The best way to approach this is (I believe) with complete honesty and transparency. The more you don’t want to address a topic which is part of the cultural and historical context between country and individuals the less respect you are showing to a participant. However, still be tactful and respectful with this as it may never be a direct topic of conversation and more of an atmospheric ‘understanding’

Spend some time understanding and reading about the history and culture of where you are going. Practice having these conversations as much as you can. Simulate and role play in safe environments and pressure test each other to have strategies in place for when certain things might happen.

Can I relate to you?

~ Race/Ethnicity ~ Perceived Gender/Sex ~ Social Status ~ Interest/Circumstance ~ Education

This leads into a known staple of finding a way to relate to your participants being key to building good relationships to research discovery.

Especially in circumstances where you do not share a country of residence think beforehand about where commonalities lay.

Food is often a good universal value :) (but be careful with folks with food-related trauma)

'Deep ethnographic’ vs ‘dip-in, dip-out researcher’

The first things I’d like to define before going into projects are these terms i use for the two types of research approach.

Neither are right or wrong I think it’s a preference/inclination but do be aware of where you operate more and it’s affects on the research, you and the community.

Deep ethnographic. Kathmandu living labs

A colleague seen here sat around a low table with community members in Kathmandu Nepal helped me understand an ethnographic and anthropological approach to design research when he spent months in a community in Nepal working on a research and tech project.

Team Rubicon UK and SARAID Community resilience team

Flood prevention and homeless crisis response volunteer work with crisis response organisations Team Rubicon UK and Search and Rescue.

Deep ethnographic to me, means making a genuine connection to the group or subject and becoming ‘part’ of the group. You can get incredibly rich information you would not through other means but beware this can lead to bias so being self-aware is key.

‘Dip-in, Dip-out’ researcher. Dispatcher by Ushahidi.

Dip in, get the information we need and dip out. This tends to be seen more in the non-humanitarian design world, perhaps due to the lifecycle of projects and ‘client’ work and typically trusts that you can gather needed information quickly.

‘Dip-in, Dip-out’ researcher. Isooko public workshop.

With complex topics like crisis and peace, I still leaned towards deeper ethnographic work and found myself creating bonds with the participants during and after the project.

Stay safety, stay healthy. Take burner phones, extra devices, do interviews in pairs or threes

Take burner phones, extra devices, do interviews in pairs or threes.

Choose public or safe areas to conduct interview and vet the areas beforehand. Do this for yourself but also your participants! Also make sure a participant can reasonably get to a location within their financial means or make sure you compensate them. Also understand cultural differences. In Kenya there was something we were told about acceptable ‘lateness’ so we expected participants to be within the locally accepted lateness standards.

Look into the local police and hospital structures and simulate/discuss what to do in these circumstances. Make sure you have both a company and field study travel and safety policy.

Be sure you’re careful of different laws like LGBT+ criminalisation.

Investigate local happenings like mugging areas and how they happen.

Get your vaccinations and take ample medication. Expect a certain amount of travellers sickness.

Doing your own field study in an emerging market.

Doing your own field study in an emerging market. Some resources + tips.

Practice on your next holiday*

~ Community research online ~ Photography ~ Ask taxi drivers about your topic

*Optional. This activity may frustrate who you’re on holiday with

When/if you go abroad or to a far destination, here are some (optional!) things to practice.

Look into the location through community research online. This can be looking at meetup, facebook groups and event write or any local equivalent. I also use couch surfing and interpals to explore other cultures and communities.

Take lots of photos of interesting cultural things. Posters in cafes, graffiti, notice boards.

Talk to and ask taxi drivers about your topic of interest. Most Taxi drivers (that can speak a language you’re comfortable in) will happily offer you their insight and the insight of those immediate to them, especially if its a large scale important topic.

But be careful! in a Taxi you are in a strangers vehicle! there is a power imbalance here and you will need to be careful with probing into deeper values.

Read reports.

Many NGO’s and organisations publish reports. Some tech related and some not. Here are two fantastic ones:

Leaving no one behind: Lessons from the Kerala disasters: https://www.preventionweb.net/publications/view/69992

The Mobile Economy Sub-Saharan Africa 2019 https://www.gsma.com/r/mobileeconomy/sub-saharan-africa/

Conferences + Events

~ Rightscon ~ Internet Freedom Festival ~ Mozfest ~ Peace tech labs ~ Tech4Good

These conferences and events have a focus on the interaction of tech/digital and human rights/humanitarian/non-profit.

Good orgs to follow.

~ Electronic Frontier Foundation eff.org ~ AccessNow accessnow.org ~ Advocacy Assembly advocacyassembly.org ~ Centre for humanitarian data centre.humdata.org

These organisations actively work in the human rights and digital/technology intersection.

Books!

There are lots of projects I haven’t been able to talk about like health related projects looking at HIV and AIDS across East and Central Africa but we’ll save those for another time!

Here are some great books on emerging markets and ‘the next billion users’. Highly recommended.

Thanks folks.

@erioldoesdesign linkedin.com/in/eriolfox github.com/Erioldoesdesign medium.com/@EriolDoesDesign