Our IDEO.org mobile money team heads to the field, teaching and collaborating with our client partner team from CGAP along the way.

IDEO.org is working with the Consultative Group to Assist the Poor (CGAP) to design new solutions to increase the usage of mobile money among low-income customers. This is our second project with CGAP and the organization is becoming increasingly human-centered in its approach. As part of this project, CGAP expressed an interest in participating in our design process so that they could learn more about HCD. 

With this request in mind, we decided to pursue a unique project structure that balances human-centered empathy research with various exercises and activities designed to teach our client team the HCD process. This was an exciting prospect for us, as it can be powerful for partner and client teams to hear from the voice of the users firsthand. The challenge for the IDEO.org team was this: how to balance working as a small, nimble and focused design team in cross-contextual, translator-dependent situations while balancing the desire to create a great learning experience for five people from the client team new to the HCD process?

So how did we do it? IDEO.org Fellows Cris Valerio and Carla Lopez crafted an ambitious two-team plan for our two weeks in the field. Team Banana (the IDEO.org team + a translator) focused on user interviews in various communities so that they could get up to speed quickly on user needs. Team Mango (the CGAP client team) embarked on daily challenges (which we revealed to them each morning) that included exploratory immersion, empathy building, and intercept-style interviewing in several low-income neighborhoods. Team Mango focused on a different set of themes and questions each day, such as, “How do users use mobile-payment services to make different types of purchases?”

After each challenge, Team Mango came back from the field tired but excited about what they had learned from exploring various communities, meeting a range of low-income people, and catching a glimpse of how users make decisions about when and how to use mobile payment. This approach was an incredibly insightful experience for both our client team and IDEO.org, as CGAP’s input and collaboration proved to be invaluable during subsequent brainstorming sessions. We count ourselves lucky to have partnered with such a great client team, as they continuously moved the work forward with keen observations and insights.