Benchmarking Studies and Human-Centered Design
Methodological Purity: Sticking to What We Know
Sometimes, sticking to a designated method of doing something, like adhering to the rules of a particular discipline, can limit our perspective. While sticking to a particular discipline's values, assumptions, and processes helps people within that discipline maintain consistency and coherence, one cannot argue against this simple fact: there is a lot to gain from exploring different ways of looking at things.
Look at it this way: if you put a frog on a table in front of a veterinarian and a biologist, they will have different ways of looking at the frog, informed by their fields of work. The veterinarian might focus on the frog's health or medical needs, while the biologist might study its habitat, or its ecological role. Each perspective offers valuable insights into the frog's life, but from different angles and with different objectives– and both might gain to learn from each other’s perspectives.
Human-centered design (HCD) works on understanding and putting people at the center of a design process. It’s about understanding an end user’s needs, behaviors, and contexts to create a product or service that will meet these needs better. As a discipline, HCD provides researchers with a set of tools, like ethnographic research, usability testing, and prototyping, amongst others. While these methods help researchers align the design process with user needs, sometimes that is not enough. There is value in looking towards tools borrowed from other fields to understand users, even ones that might not always appear to be “human-centric”.
In this case, we will be looking at how a conventional business perspective can help provide another lens to understand a user’s needs.
Benchmarking & HCD: An Unlikely Pairing
The word "benchmark" originated from medieval craftsmen carving measurements into their workbenches. They would align materials with these pre-set marks to ensure accurate sizing for the products they were making. In today’s world, benchmarking refers to a practice of comparing an organization’s practices or performance with those of its competitors or peers. While this practice might not initially seem like an important tool in the HCD toolkit, it can help with understanding what the ideal customer might expect in the context of industry standards. This, in turn, can help inform the research process. What researchers learn from benchmarking studies can feed into the prototyping and design process of a product or service.
While typical HCD methods might focus on the ‘micro’ perspective, i.e. on the immediate user, benchmarking can help provide a ‘macro’ perspective to the environment the user exists in and the business models that govern that environment. All of this can help create a better understanding of user needs.
Benchmarking Device Financing Services in the Global South: A Case Study
When Ideate took on a project for a major telecommunications company in Sri Lanka, the task was clear: leverage device financing to boost mobile money uptake. Alongside the usual human-centered design (HCD) activities like user research and design workshops, we embarked on a benchmarking study. The team realized how important it was to not use benchmarking as an isolated activity, and ensured it became the cornerstone of our approach.
The team built an analytical comparative framework, in which the telecom company’s services were broken down and compared against those of its global competitors and counterparts.
The framework, as seen above, tried to accurately reflect the different ways in which users would go through the device financing process, starting from understanding their eligibility criteria, to understanding the loan application process and the different modes for making repayments.
This is where the benchmarking came in. The framework provided above was then used to benchmark or compare the Sri Lankan telecommunications company’s services against 7 other device financing services from the Global South. A variety of data was used for this comparison and was aided by both secondary research as well as talking to industry experts in the device financing sector.
Insights & Ways Forward:
Using the insights from our benchmarking study, we probed deeper into different payment plans and incentives through our research guides. For example, we asked users about their preferences between flexible and fixed payment plans, based on the insights generated from the benchmarking study around device financing models like Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) and Pay As You Go (PAYGo).
Additionally, some insights from the benchmarking study directly informed the recommendations we made to the client. For instance, we saw how Safaricom Kenya’s successful targeted marketing campaign targeted underserved communities, specially, with low-cost smartphones. Using this information, we recommended similar strategies tailored to the preferences and behaviors of relevant communities in Sri Lanka.
Similarly, the benchmarking study emphasized the success of partnerships between mobile manufacturers and mobile network operators (MNOs) in developing low-cost smartphones that are customized to the needs and preferences of users in the target market. We recommended the client to consider such valuable partnerships for developing low-cost, customized smartphones to drive smartphone penetration in underserved communities.
In essence, the benchmarking study was an invaluable contributor to the subsequent user research as it allowed us to test ideas we had not previously considered through prototyping while also directly feeding into our recommendations to the client.