Think You Research Your Customers? Meet Jan Chipchase

From the NYT today, an amazing story about Nokia's “human-behavior researcher.”

"Last summer, Chipchase sat through a monsoon-season downpour inside the one-room home of a shoe salesman and his family, who live in the sprawling Dharavi slum of Mumbai. Using an interpreter who spoke Tamil, he quizzed them about the food they ate, the money they had, where they got their water and their power and whom they kept in touch with and why.

He was particularly interested in the fact that the family owned a cellphone, purchased several months earlier so that the father, who made the equivalent of $88 a month, could run errands more efficiently for his boss at the shoe shop. The father also occasionally called his wife, ringing her at a pay phone that sat 15 yards from their house. Chipchase noted that not only did the father carry his phone inside a plastic bag to keep it safe in the pummeling seasonal rains but that they also had to hang their belongings on the wall in part because of a lack of floor space and to protect them from the monsoon water and raw sewage that sometimes got tracked inside.

He took some 800 photographs of the salesman and his family over about eight hours and later, back at his hotel, dumped them all onto a hard drive for use back inside the corporate mother ship. Maybe the family’s next cellphone, he mused, should have some sort of hook as an accessory so it, like everything else in the home, could be suspended above the floor."

Full story is worth reading.

Comments

[Rick Cecil]

Jan has a great Web site with some amazing presentations:

http://www.janchipchase.com/publications

Even if you're not into the mobile industry, it's fascinating stuff. His style of ethnography is probably overkill for many folks, but entrepreneurs should look into contextual inquiry and other interview techniques. Powerful ways to quickly gain an understanding of how your service might fit into people's lives.