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Everyone wants to help the poor. The needy. Sometimes the ‘want to help’ is so large that the needy are helped regardless of them.  Let us not get into the discussion of whether some NGO’s are in this just to make loads of Tax-free money.

Merry go around pumps or Roundabout playpumps, are pumps which use the energy of children playing on a merry go around. This is the conjecture: Children love to play, hence use the energy generated to pump water. Children are happy playing, and the community gets its water. The idea seemed so great the company got lots of funding (even from the US govt.) and lots of playpumps where installed.

miling, playing children, solving Africa’s water problems. It is an appealing image and one that has attracted millions of dollars in American government aid, backing from the likes of the Co-op and high-profile celebrity endorsements. The only problem is it has also been criticised by one of the world’s leading water charities as being far too expensive, too complex for local maintenance, over-reliant on child labour and based on flawed water demand calculations. So, are we just buying into yet another feel-good marketing gimmick? And what does this say about the current state of the aid industry? Read more here

The details are there in the guardian article, out of which I will list the main problems here:
1. The playpumps are too expensive ($14000 excluding drilling)
2. The maintenance is difficult and spare parts are not easily found.
3. It ‘Needs’ the kids to play to do something which is a necessity. So in a way it is child labor.

Why did nobody see such obvious points earlier? One big reason could be the pictures of smiling children.

Who doesn’t want children to be happy, and also solve a big problem, that of water. Researchers have known that their presence necessarily changes the outcome of the observation (hiesenberg’s principle at play ? :P). But I guess in this case they did not realize the extent. A researcher pointed out that as soon as he reached the pump site, children used to rush towards him. Seeing a white guy, seemed to excite the kids and they always started to play. Questioning locals, he found out that this is a more common scenario: a lone woman pushing the playpump to pump water.

As the guardian article remarks,

They can keep quiet and watch money wasted in massive quantities, or expose the waste and risk damaging charitable giving to the sector as a whole.

Now lets take an example which is closer to my country India.

Sethu Sethunarayanan, founder and director of the Center for the Development of Disadvantaged People (CDDP), an organization dedicated to aiding the Irulas, enlisted the help of a mechanical engineer to make a rat trap that is effective 95 percent of the time compared to the old method which was successful only 40 percent of the time. read more

The difference in both these examples is the way of Intervention. In the first case the intervention is being implemented by another body (someone other than the people), and hence has limitations. The third party may not want to accept failure, after having come so far. Even if they do, it will send a negative message to contributors, who might be turned off contributing to that sector at all. The fact that the rat traps are being made by the Irula’s themselves, makes the second plan foolproof. If the Irulas later find that the rat trap is indeed not useful, or not worth the effort they can just stop making them. What this implies is that it is not sufficient to solve social problems by design, even the implementation has to be well thought out.

While I was freelancing, I would get lets of work proposals for UI interface designing and UI development. Frankly I took them only if they paid really well or if I needed work badly. When people asked me what exactly do you do as a UX designer, most of what I say even now is mostly abstract and filled with subjective words such as experience, perception, flow, and so on. I have now realized that it is far better to give them real examples, problems which they most probably would have faced in their lives. And then say that I solve these problems, or even better, I try to avoid such problems in the first place.  This is the first of such blog posts which will give examples from the real world of user experience problems. I have already a bunch of posts dedicated to a specific design problems, but these posts would see the problems at a much higher level.

So the first example comes out of my experience in getting an internet connection in Hyderabad. I have an apartment which is though at the heart of Gachi Bowli, the IT area, still it is in the middle of nowhere regarding internet connectivity. There are no service providers who have their wiring in this area, which leaves only the ones based on Wi-max technology. Reliance and Tata Indicom. I chose tata indicom for two reasons: Having had a bad experience with Reliance earlier. And there was already a tata indicom connection in my building. The initial part was straightforward, I took the phone number from my neighbour and called up. The executive came and collected the documents etc in a day. And then I got a few emails, which were all, of the sort, “everything is going fine!”.

The executive had told me it would take 3 days for any action. Today being the fourth day I re-looked at the emails. I remembered seeing an enquiry number which I could see status of on the indicom site.

It has this line:

Your enquiry no is 177963. To check the status of the enquiry please log on to our website www.tataindicombroadband.in/wireless

Now let us analyse the problems with this statement. The first part tells me my specific enquiry number. This is absolutely fine. Also note that this number is a six digit number, so it has 1/100000 chance of someone else guessing this number and checking it.  The second part informs me that I can check the status, but on one condition - “I have to log on” . Since I do not have a login yet, I am stumped. What should I do now? I look at the other emails to see if there is a username or password somewhere. I find there is none. But let us assume there is a way that I can still log on. Which I might find if I search their website well enough. If there is such a page, why isn’t the third part, the permalink for that page. Why would I want to go to www.tataindicombroadband.in/wireless . This is the homepage for different plans, and this would have made sense if I was not sure which plan I wanted.

The problem can be broken down:

1. I do not know a way to login to see the status of my enquiry
2. The email just in three lines meanders from the issue of my enquiry status to giving me a choice between their various plans.

I am pretty sure the second part is there because of a business guy, who would have wanted to let users know of their different plans. And that is the problem with user experience. In most corporations designers are still seen as the ones who design UI. I have talked earlier about what ‘design’ actually means as an english word and how it is widely interpreted today. So a designer would never be associated with something like sending an email to prospective customers. This email would be concieved by a business analyst and written by a someone who would have been pressured to remove all the grammatical errors and to make the english more formal.

After the above lines there is this, which would finally of help to the user:

For any further queries, do write to us at customerservice@tatacommunication.com or call our Customer Service Number in your city.
Do remember to quote your enquiry number for information related to your connection.

And this in fact came here because of a scene like this,

Oh, but we also have a call center. Do put the link for the phone numbers and also the email id.

Do post other such problems you might have faced.

If you don’t read the text, the ad will feel like one of an escort agency. Maybe they have figured it out, that playing on sexual angle is more profitable for the facebook age group.

Another thing to be noted here is that they are using dating as a way to marriage. The copy says “meet local singles” which is more congruent to dating. Picture via Lalit.

It is great to know about designers who have left such a mark on design that you see their vision in todays products. See these images to know what I mean.

In each picture one of the two items most of you would recognize. The other ones are the ones designed by Dieter Rams during the 1960s.

The boundaries between advertising and social media seem to be disappearing. See this full page ad in a Newspaper, advertising a chewing gum. All the tweets were made by real people (I hope trident is not paying these people to tweet :P). See this tweet.