“To say that something is designed means it has intentions that go beyond its function. Otherwise it’s just planning” — Ayse Birsel, Author and Co-founder of Birsel + Seck

Typically, user-centred design starts with a deceptively simple question: who is going to use this, and what do they need to accomplish? Answering this requires looking beyond the product itself to the circumstances in which it will be used, the user’s skills and limitations, and the steps involved in getting a job done.

I Brought Google and Amazon Together

It is not often that you see Google and Amazon working together to solve a problem. And I am happy that I was the one who brought the two tech giants together, for a person who needed it most. Don’t believe me? Here is how it happened.

The people who have borne the brunt of the pandemic are the low- and middle-income folks who depend on daily or weekly wages to support their families. Auto-rickshaw and cab drivers are one such group. Human movement forms the crux of their economic model: the more dynamic it is, the better the business. With the pandemic, that movement is just an iota of what it was, say, six months earlier. To survive, folks must look at whatever opportunities are available, and since a driver’s core skills are driving and knowing a locality, one service they can offer is home delivery of products ordered online. An auto-rickshaw driver I know switched to this work to support his family of five.

At a 10,000-foot level, product fulfilment works like this. Once an order is placed online, a warehouse is identified to deliver the item. At the warehouse, delivery boxes headed for nearby locations are grouped into a baggage, which is assigned to a delivery agent. The agent picks up the baggage and delivers each box to its customer within a predefined time window.

The driver I know signed up with Amazon as a last-mile delivery agent.

Amazon has done well to understand that the app these agents use must be localized, because in most cases the person doing the job is a local with little or no knowledge of English. Once a language is chosen, the interface and the information in it, including the delivery addresses, are displayed in that language. It is a wonderful capability that not only helps people who are not proficient in English but also widens Amazon’s hiring pool.

However, there is a fundamental flaw that Amazon’s product managers and designers have overlooked, one that almost cost the driver, who has no knowledge of English, his livelihood.

The addresses in the app can be read in a language of one’s choice, but the address printed and pasted on each delivery box is still in English. So, you have boxes, every one of them labelled in a language you cannot read, and an app that lists the delivery addresses in a language you can. What you cannot do is work out which box goes to which address, because the label on the box is in a language alien to you.

Now, as product managers and designers of the workflow, how could one overlook this? If someone switches an app to a language other than English, it is safe to assume they are not comfortable with English; that is the very reason to offer localization. Not having an option to localize the address printed on the delivery box is, then, not only a half-baked solution but also defeats the purpose of offering a language other than English in the app.

This is the situation the driver was in when I met him. Either he had to give up what seemed to be his only way to earn a livelihood, or he had to learn English to read the labels. Neither was a viable option.

So, I went to Google to solve the problem.

Google offers a plethora of apps without any apparent payment for using them. I say apparent because if data can be encashed, then using an app pays for it and more, but that can be discussed another time. One such free app is Google Translate. It is a wonderful app; it translates text between languages.

From the app, I pointed the phone’s camera at the address on a delivery box and, voilà, the address printed in English appeared in the local language, Kannada. Now, he could read it with ease.

With the Amazon app showing the delivery addresses in the local language, and Google Translate showing the address on each box in the same language, he could not only pick up orders but also deliver the right boxes to the customers.

And I had the satisfaction of bringing Amazon and Google together to help a person earn a livelihood.

The experience described above is an example of what happens when we look at a problem from the user’s point of view. My fix required no new technology to be developed and no redesign of the app. It required someone to notice the gap between what the system offered and what the person using it needed. It was, though, a workaround. It solved the problem for this driver, but he now needed two apps to do one job, and the labels on the boxes remained in English.

Technology had made the job accessible to him, but only because someone happened to be there to bridge the gap.

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