Ethnographic research targeting Grocery Vendors in Ujjain, Madhya Pradesh, to observe their general attitudes and communication patterns to find everything out about their use of mobile phones in their daily lives.

Great design connects with the user intuitively. For that intuitive connection, designers need to have compassion and empathy for their audiences. In Design, empathy is a factor of putting yourself in users' shoes, feeling their joys and their pains. Ethnography is a design methodology that informs design by helping a designer embody that deep understanding of the user by making sense of their world. It is a research method involving observing users in their natural environment rather than in a formal research setting. When ethnography is applied to design, it helps designers create compelling, intuitive, and usable solutions. This research methodology helps a designer set aside their own perspective or individual biases, i.e., their own conditioning that informs their worldview, and get into users' shoes and think from their perspective. Being in their shoes, what they think, feel, and value, based on the culture that has shaped their identity and aspirations, a designer is equipped to understand their needs and solve their problems through design.

The objective:
To understand general attitudes and find out communication patterns among the working class in India.
Target group: Grocery vendors.
Duration: 10 days
Deliverables: Report consisting of Transcripts of interviews with the grocery vendors, Personal Observations, Analysis of the data collected, Coding, and synthesis

Strategy:
Befriending a few grocery vendors.
Casual conversations with them daily, observing their work area and ways of working, by hovering over them, and casual open-ended interviews.
Getting invited to their homes and gatherings is a plus.
Look more like them and blend in.


The general trend that came out:

Suspicion-
Coming from a stressed background, socially and economically, they were secretive, hiding financial information about themselves from neighbors, co-workers, and even close relatives who lived adjacent to them (I was invited to visit their living space).

Conservative-
Being socially stressed, they embodied a conservative approach to life. Strong gender roles, mistrust of wives, and wives were not given phones. Though both husbands and wives worked on the grocery stalls.

Networking-
Being economically stressed, they regretted not getting an education and not leveraging the opportunity that they had. Made them networking oriented to make new connections and nurture them that could help their upliftment. I was contacted by one vendor months later to get advice on their children's education over the phone.

Lack of education-
They understood the importance of education, having difficulty in making money, and wanted their children to do better and send them for education by saving money. Not all of them could read or write; they especially regretted not knowing English.

Profit/Money oriented-
Being economically stressed and a lack of resources made them money-oriented; everything is weighed against monetary gain.

Mobile Communication-
Used mainly by males to contact the middleman for groceries. Or maintaining friendly ties. Simple Nokia phones were being used for the general purpose of calling.

Based on their general attitudes and values, any solution designed to help them make money more easily- would be a huge motivator for them to use it, but in their own language especially where they don't have to write or read on phone ie voice enabled solution, and payments handled in a simple transparent manner to ease their general suspicion would be successful with them.

The Process:
Daily direct communication with the concerned community, building trust, non-communication observation of their attitudes, behaviours, and daily life, understanding their work and way of living, observing them at their work, and visiting their homes.