Fifteen minutes before Lauren Serota’s Lufthansa flight landed in Riyadh, the female passengers stood and moved to the bathroom. Most had been wearing Western clothes — jeans, blouses, and gold jewelry. They returned in black abayas and head scarves (hijabs), some wearing face coverings (niqabs). The context switch was dramatic and immediate. Serota pulled her own hijab up over her head as the plane hit the tarmac, and she resolved to pay attention.
This was her first visit to Saudi Arabia. On the ground, she met up with Jan Chipchase, her partner on an immersive 21-day assignment to figure out how Saudi youth relate to their phones. Serota, 32, and Chipchase, 46, are both designers with Studio D, a consultancy Chipchase launched in 2014. They had been hired by Saudi Telecom Company (STC), which planned to launch a new brand to target Saudi youth. But first, it had to figure out what Saudi youth might want.
There are as many approaches to market research as there are markets to research, but in the past decade, the type of human-centered design research that Studio D practices has grown increasingly popular. For many large companies attempting to seed new businesses, it has become synonymous with listening to customers. It’s a method Chipchase deserves some credit for helping create. Well before design had entered the lexicon of most business schools, he was, as principal scientist of Nokia Research, documenting the way people used their cell phones in remote parts of Africa and Asia. Former Frog Design president Doreen Lorenzo calls him “the Indiana Jones” of research. He has written three books on the topic, with titles like Hidden Within Plain Sight and the forthcoming The Field Study Handbook.
The trouble is, Chipchase thinks many companies approach research all wrong. He believes the problem lies in their intent: Instead of entering new markets with an open mind, they approach with a strategy in place and then look for the people who prove their theories right. “The only thing worse than not asking the questions, is not paying attention to the answers that don’t fit into their world view, because it’s inconvenient,” says Chipchase.
I’ve known Chipchase for close to a decade, and we started talking about this regularly last January, when I was writing about Facebook’s efforts to get more people online through Internet.org. Facebook had launched a Free Basics service in India that provided free access to a select number of apps. Indian activists accused the social network of violating net neutrality by giving preference to those appmakers. As the debate escalated over the course of 2015, Mark Zuckerberg took a direct stance, publishing a Times of India op-ed in which he wrote about a farmer named Ganesh, who used Free Basics to look up weather information and commodity prices and was able to get better deals. Instead of appeasing critics, Zuckerberg’s opinion fueled the growing backlash. In February, in a big setback to Internet.org, India’s telecom regulator blocked the service altogether.
Chipchase calls Facebook’s flop in India “a watershed moment” for large Western companies trying to launch products and services in the emerging world. He criticizes Facebook for relying on the Ganesh example in its strategic communications on why Free Basics should exist, while at the same time not listening to the Indians who were online, voicing their opinions. Says Chipchase, “Organizations love to talk about bringing the user’s voice into the conversation, yet if it’s just to retrofit an existing growth strategy, it’s morally bankrupt, and in a connected society, a very poor strategy.”
What does it really mean to listen to the people who will use the technology you develop? Chipchase thinks that design research practiced correctly can offer some answers. Six months after our discussion, he got in touch to show me the research he’d just finished in Saudi Arabia, which he’d conduct with Serota. He believes it offers a powerful counterexample: they embarked upon their assignment with broad questions. The insights they gleaned are instructive, but the methods they used to conduct their research are even more so.
The Saudi Arabia project kicked off in the fall of 2014, when Chipchase got an email from Ash Banerjee. Banerjee had just been hired as chief brand officer at Jawwy, a startup within STC that endeavored to launch a new mobile brand for young digitally native Saudis. As a middle-aged Indian executive who lived mostly in Dubai, Banerjee needed to figure out what would appeal to Saudi youth. “I’d read Jan’s blog for years,” Banerjee told me. “I thought he’d help us understand the market in a way we couldn’t otherwise.”
There were many things that he and Serota already knew about Saudi Arabia. It’s a young country; 65% of its inhabitants are less than 30 years old. Most of them are wealthy enough to have a phone, and many have several. Women have a male guardian — a father, husband, or another male family member who takes responsibility for them. Beyond shopping malls, there are few public places in the country. The cities are built to emphasize privacy, with high walls surrounding living compounds, where often there are separate entrances and places to socialize for men and women. Chipchase and Serota took on the assignment because they believed it had inherent social value: in such a closed society, digital devices had the potential to provide a degree of freedom that Saudi youth, particularly women, might not experience in other places.
Upon working out an agreement with Banerjee, the pair began by priming their personal networks. Chipchase had traveled to Saudi Arabia once before on a personal trip, and he reached out to his contacts from that time. A Saudi friend’s younger sister, who lived in the United States, helped with preliminary logistics and contacts. They reached out to other people cold on social media sites like Twitter and Instagram.
To work in the country, Serota faced a second challenge: Women weren’t able to apply for business visas. She was instead granted a five-year visa for temporary residents. To complete the application, she had to get a letter from STC in which an STC employee acted as her “mahram,” or male guardian.
Within a week of signing their contract with Jawwy, they’d pieced together a group of local contacts who agreed to help out, and had their plane tickets and visas sorted.
The defining characteristic of Studio D’s approach is that the researchers endeavor to allow subjects — users, customers, people — to speak for themselves. Chipchase and Serota started in Jeddah, and then visited the more conservative Riyadh and finally a university town called Al Khobar. In each location, they assembled mixed-gender teams of locals who worked with them as part of a “pop-up studio.” This is the term they’ve coined for their approach, in which they live and work in close quarters. (In other countries, Chipchase and Serota invite the team to live with them; in Saudi, most of the team went home every evening.) They conducted interviews during the day, and then spent long evenings attempting to make sense of the material that emerged — alongside many of the people they’d interviewed.
Their local researchers were people like Saman Sohail, who had started chatting with Chiphcase over Twitter when he visited the country a year earlier. When I asked him what motivated her to take several days off from her job as a graphic designer and help with the project, he suggested I ask her myself. Sohail, who is 29, lives in Al Khobar, but she was on vacation in London when we spoke by phone. She is from a Pakistani family, and grew up all over the Middle East. Over Twitter, she offered Chipchase advice on the project. “At first, they were just going to Jeddah and Riyadh, but I convinced them to come to Al Khobar,” she told me. “It’s small but influential because it’s near Bahrain. The youth is a bit more independent.” He and Serota asked if she wanted to help out.
When Sohail first agreed to be part of the pop-up studio, she didn’t know what company was employing Chipchase and Serota, only that they were doing market research for a new startup that would soon launch. This interested her. She also felt motivated to be represented accurately. “There’s a big misconception about what it’s like to be a female in Saudi,” she told me. Too often, she explained, people see only what is on the outside. They see women, in particular, as covered and quiet, and they miss the eclectic, opinionated interactions that happen in private, where women experience more freedom to express themselves.
Sohail helped set up interviews with local people, many of whom were her friends. She accompanied Serota on the interviews with women, and sometimes translated for her. They visited a pair of sisters in their home, and by the end of a several-hour conversation, Serota found herself bellowing out karaoke lyrics alongside the younger sister. Another interviewee was Haifa Al Owain, a public relations consultant who also ran a book club that encouraged women to read and think critically about texts.
“Why was she interested in sharing her opinions with you guys?” I later asked Chipchase.
“Well,” he replied. “You should really ask her.”
On a Sunday morning in July, I skyped with Al Owain. It was late afternoon in Al Khobar, and she spoke to me from a cafe. She told me she’d agreed to participate in the research because Sohail was a friend. “Also, if companies don’t have correct information, they can’t create good services,” she said.
She also said the Studio D interview style was unique. She met Serota and Sohail in a coffee shop, and they chatted for more than an hour. “They didn’t seem condescending,” she said. “You know how some people sometimes say big words and then laugh at you for not understanding them, or talk too simple, assuming you are not well educated? They didn’t do that.”
In all, the team conducted 38 of these interviews, divided equally among genders. Most of the time, Chipchase spoke with men, while Serota spoke with women. In a few cases, they interviewed groups of men and women together. Whenever they could, they met their subjects in familiar contexts — at their homes, or places where they socialized. By day 17, they’d put together a 120-page report sketching out the contemporary experience of the Saudi millennial.
The point of the report, to be very clear, was not to land on a new product or service for Jawwy to develop. The company had hired 14 consultancies to work on this challenge; Studio D was just one, and it would take another 18 months for Jawwy to develop a new offering and bring it to market. Chipchase and Serota were employed to create a contemporary sketch of the modern Saudi twenty-something.
These insights were broad: The report included things like the allowance the government paid university students ($264/month) and the local minimum wage ($1413/month for Saudis; $666/month for non-Saudis). It described their living situations; both men and women live at home until they are married. It included diagrams that explained what types of coverings women wore, and when they were appropriate, as well as what socials apps people preferred (Skype, Instagram and Path are popular; Facebook and BBM are fading out). Not surprisingly, it also revealed that while mobile devices were important to Saudi men, they were absolutely critical for women. Instead of hiring a full-time driver, which might be prohibitively expensive and require planning ahead, for example, they could use on-demand services like Careem, for which they paid roughly $650/month.
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