Moving beyond the Product
Posted by Elyse Marr
Elyse Marr | Embrace Product Designer
R&D team with focus in Human Factors in Design
Often people ask, “What do you do for human factors in design?” I tell them very simply: I keep my ears and eyes open at all times; I listen to stories and learn from people’s life experiences. I do not focus on gathering data points and information so that I can know. I strive to feel comfortable in imagining similar scenarios and situations that I can understand and feel. We call it empathy building.
For the past three months I have been on human factors trips to start uncovering the emotional underpinnings of rural India health care at the village levels. On these trips, I was asking myself, “Who is it that are we really creating this product for? Is it an overwhelmed, fearful mother, or perhaps an unappreciated, overworked health care worker, or maybe a confident community midwife? What is their daily life? What are their daily stressors? Where do they derive a sense of strength and pride? What are their personal aspirations and their definition of success?
By asking these questions, I strive to bring back our user’s opinion to the discussion of product development. But keeping in mind, the user is never wrong - in the sense that there is always a rationale and reason for their answers and actions. A guiding principle we have, as Tim Brown explains Change by Design, is that “behaviors are never right or wrong, but they are always meaningful.” I am aiming to see what drives their actions. Why is that mother constantly collecting and reusing the starched water from potatoes and rice when she is cooking? Or why does she keep the packaging on a fast consumable good such as soap, maintaining all the folds and creases and displayed on shelf in the communal space? Behind many of these seemly mundane observations are values and guiding principles in people’s behaviors.
With human factors research, we hope to become experience designers through our product so that users feel empowered by their actions with their infants, and feel more successful as health care providers. I bring back these experiences from the field in stories to the design team to help guide the inspiration and character of Embrace’s product development. But by doing so, we hope to banish the old view of research and users as subjects in a study, and see them as a prominent presence and voice in the brainstorm and design discussions. In a way, we become social engineers crafting a means to growth and change behind the technical solutions of our product. Objects often hold personal meaning and therefore our material world can do so much more for us as people: facilitate enabling actions, help educate, empower the overlooked, furnish emotional bonds.
With Embrace entering the traditions of childbirth, this product use can mean so much more, and as a result, we have an opportunity to do so much more. As a human factors team member, I am excited to find opportunities in the new experiences with the brilliant people I meet in the field. To furnish creativity and change, we have to see beyond the immediate situations of poverty with pity and remorse, and approach it with excitement and faith in these new acquaintances, who I now see as friends. I am humbled by people’s patience with me to explain their own as a unique knowledge, and values within their cultural context. I am excited to see the different frame works of life, and be able to incorporate it on a personal level, but help shape new perspectives within my design team. By dreaming about loving experience opportunities in a home between the mothers and children I met in the villages, I hope in someway, I can help make it truly happen, by implementing it through the development of Embrace.