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Insights to Decisions: Making Qualitative Research Actionable
17 Plays1 month ago
Welcome to the fourth episode of The Qual Point of View, a limited podcast series featuring expert voices from the field using qualitative insights for real-time decision-making.
In this episode, Ooloi Labs co-founder Akshay Roongta speaks with Anjali Moorthy, now a Service Design Lead at Care City, about what it takes to practice qualitative research from inside the systems you are trying to influence.
The episode explores designing and conducting research in settings where people cannot pause their work to accommodate ideal processes, where systems are overstretched, and where insight must respond to frontline realities rather than the other way around.
From curriculum design and public health work in India to social care systems in the United Kingdom, Anjali reflects on the realities of human-centered work and what actually changes when we move beyond surveys and metrics, to observe real workflows, question assumptions, and uncover hidden challenges. The conversation is a powerful reminder that qualitative insights can shape not just services and interventions, but the way institutions think, decide, and act.
The episode also engages with familiar tensions: why research so often sits unused and how to move it into action, how to use narratives without overextending them, how qualitative and quantitative approaches strengthen each other, and ways to build trust in research within operationally stretched environments.
At its heart, this is a conversation about designing with humility. If you work in research, service design, public systems, or any role that shapes decisions affecting people, this episode offers thoughtful reflections on how to bring the “why” behind the numbers into everyday practice.
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Transcript
Introduction to 'The Qual Point of View' Podcast
00:00:00
Speaker
Welcome everyone, and thanks for tuning in to The Qual Point of View, a podcast series by Uloy Labs. I'm Akshay, one of the co-founders of Uloy Labs, and my background is in design research and strategy, where over the last 16 years, I've worked in the social impact space across various domains.
00:00:20
Speaker
Today, we're talking about the power of data in informing decisions, but not the kind you'll be familiar with. We're diving into the world of qualitative data.
00:00:30
Speaker
When we think of data, we often prioritize numbers. Qualitative research brings something just as crucial, the why behind the what. It captures human stories, experiences, and nuances that go far beyond numbers, helping us truly understand the issues we're trying to solve.
Anjali's Career Journey in Qualitative Research
00:00:50
Speaker
On today's episode, we have Anjali joining us from London, where at the time of recording she was working at the London Office of Technology and Innovation, where she brings her understanding of human-centered service design to issues around citizen access to care services, building on her experiences as a Teach for India Fellow and Service Designer at Noora Health Care Labs.
00:01:15
Speaker
To begin with, I asked her about early experiences with research, and more importantly, about how she came to learn about the power of qualitative data and insights. It led her to share a few examples from the early days of her career, and in the episode, we jump right in at the point where she's describing her experience while on assignment designing curriculum in the domain of banking and finance as part upskilling programs.
00:01:43
Speaker
Let's listen in.
00:01:49
Speaker
So I think curriculum design is a very natural career progression for anyone who's been a teacher. And so I think here, what was interesting for me is I was designing curriculum for things that I had never actually done before. So one that we did was loan officer because we were trying to help people get into roles that you don't necessarily need a full master's degree for. Mm-hmm.
00:02:12
Speaker
But a little training will actually make you a much better candidate and very successful in your career. So loan officer was an interesting one, which was basically for these small and medium sized banks across tier two, two or three cities in India, trying to work with businesses to give them loans.
00:02:29
Speaker
So because we'd never done any of these roles before, obviously, a big part of designing the cur curriculum was actually figuring out what that role was, what it took to be successful in the role, and then using that those insights to design
The Power of Observation in Qualitative Research
00:02:43
Speaker
the curriculum. yeah I think Generation had a really nice way of splitting up what we were teaching into technical things, behavioral skills and mindsets, employment essentials, those kind of things.
00:02:53
Speaker
But I think yeah a really vivid example there, which I think we talked about earlier, was You can ask people, what do you need to be a good loan officer? And obviously they'll say things like, you need to understand what the loan packages are. You need to be able to pitch the loan really well. You need to understand the customer. So these are things that people can tell you when you ask them. We were also sort of fortunate to be able to shadow people who are actually doing the role. nice And one of the things that we saw on one of these visits, I think in Bombay, was we were shadowing a person who was a loan officer and he was sort of one of the very successful ones. yeah So we wanted to see like what is best practice that he's doing that he may not realize.
00:03:29
Speaker
I remember as he was going from business to business, pitching the loan product, there would often be like massive travel time. So an hour between two places, two hours between two places.
00:03:40
Speaker
And on the way, he would actually be making calls to line up his pitches and his appointments for the second half of the day or for the next day. Right. So he wasn't wasting time sort of saying, okay, I'll go back to the office after I do all of this and start planning. He was using those sort of liminal spaces to make those calls and set himself up. Yeah.
00:04:01
Speaker
And it's actually something he didn't say he did well when we talked to him. His manager didn't say, you know, this guy makes calls and he uses time. But it's actually one of the things that made him very, very high performing and successful. And that we were then able to integrate into some tips on how you use time better, things like that.
00:04:17
Speaker
Yeah. I think what's interesting for me, and this is something that came up in another conversation, was the value of you not being the expert, being the person observing, right? Because, I mean, the star performers manager might also know this, you know, might have observed it.
00:04:38
Speaker
But because that person sort of so close to it, they don't see it as special either. Right. Or see, make that connection. And so you being a bit on the outside are able to make that connection. And have you seen that play out in any of the other contexts, you know, where not having that expertise or being so immersed has been of help to observe something novel?
Project Nightingales and the Caregiving Lab
00:05:01
Speaker
Yeah, that's a good question. I think it can go two ways. Sometimes going in completely without any context is helpful because you're noticing things and you're asking questions that people are sort of no longer asking because it's just so normalized.
00:05:18
Speaker
But there is also the flip side of like, you are asking for time for people who are already busy, especially when you're working with people who are on the front line. I think it can sometimes also be like, you should do the work of doing the homework and understanding.
00:05:31
Speaker
what you're asking for and what you're trying to learn. I think there's probably examples of not being the expert in when I did a piece of work with the caregiving lab at Noura.
00:05:43
Speaker
and I think you've seen the outputs of some of this work, but basically so were trying to understand like hardly. Yeah. Yeah, so basically this was a project called Project Nightingales, which I think took up most of my time when I was at Noora Health at the caregiving lab. It was basically the product team had sort of said we were going to design an app for nurses who are the people who are providing training to the parents and caregivers, patients and caregivers that we work with.
00:06:09
Speaker
And can you sort of help us design this app, figure out what needs to go into it? Can we gamify things? What kind of resources should we provide? And I think after a few conversations with the product team, we both came to the realization of actually we don't fully understand our nurses and what they need. and how they work. So let's take a step back and sort of do that understanding work.
00:06:31
Speaker
So we did a lot of interviews, a lot of similar sort of shadowing nurses across urban and rural cities in India. And what came out of this, I think, four or five month long project were a set of design principles that if you are ever going to work with a nurse in that you're designing a product or a service that you expect a nurse use or deliver,
00:06:51
Speaker
Here are some things to keep in mind because we realized this about the way their work functions. I think one interesting thing was when you look at a nurse doing or her work, you realize that they're on the move constantly. I don't think I saw a nurse sat down even once throughout that entire project.
00:07:11
Speaker
And the way their work functions is it's very, very reactive. It's very, very responsive. They don't actually have any control over what they're doing in any one minute. They have a list of tasks that they need to do by the end of the day, week, month, but they have very little control over when they do it.
00:07:27
Speaker
And so we noticed actually the program that was designed, the care companion program was like the nurse needs to sit in the room, collect all the patients and caregivers and deliver this session on like how do you continue this caregiving at home. yeah And I think it's scheduled to take 30, 40-ish minutes because that's how long it takes to deliver the information that they need to.
00:07:48
Speaker
But it's so rare that a nurse can actually sit in one room for 30 or 40 minutes and do anything at one stretch. They would constantly be called out to leave. And so one of the big principles that came out of that was if you want your nurse to use a product or a service that you're designing, you cannot expect them to use it for more than 10 or 15 minutes at a time.
00:08:07
Speaker
And you also cannot expect for them to be able to predict what time of the day they'll use it in. So if you're designing with that in mind and you design around that and you make it so that it's very modular, so that it can be done picked up and dropped off whenever, you're more likely to be successful and you're more likely to have them use your product or service.
00:08:26
Speaker
Right, right, right. And I think that's not something that they would have been able to tell you if you ask them. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think, The experience is just that when you sometimes go in and this sort of similar to that loan officer thing is what you pick up and you observe because you spend time with the person, not necessarily asking them to report, but really observing that and then picking up that information and just kind of
00:08:57
Speaker
Being able to compare that with your own expectations before you went in, yeah in that kind of a space. Just taking a step back, because I think Caregiving Lab is interesting. And one thing that we're very curious about are mechanisms for organizations, companies to be able to use qualitative data effectively,
00:09:22
Speaker
and to be able to do it in a long-term kind of fashion, not just sort of commissioning studies and, you know, and the document is on some shelf or a Google Drive folder or something like that, right? And I think Caregiving Lab was a very interesting mechanism that Noora Health had. So if you can talk about that a little bit and what were some of the projects that you undertook, like Project Nightingale is something that you were very involved with, but what else was the Caregiving Lab doing? in How did that interface with the rest of the team, which was, I mean, scaling, caught up in the operational kind of side of things, right? Given its very, very on-ground support and and all of that.
00:10:03
Speaker
Yeah, Caregiving Lab, you're right, was set up with the intention of exactly that. So, Neura Health is already a very, very design-led organization. It was born out of a design thinking class. It's actually one of the few organizations that puts design first. And you can see in the way the team is set up that there's a very strong service design function in everything.
00:10:22
Speaker
I think the reason the caregiving lab was set up was you want to create a space where you can ask questions of the thing that you're doing in your day-to-day operations. You can poke at it. You can learn new things and improve it without putting the day-to-day operations at risk or sending it into sort of an existential crisis.
00:10:43
Speaker
Because if you've noticed, even if you as a single individual human being are working on something, the minute you stop to question it, I think it's a very difficult space to continue on business as usual, but also keep questioning it. So it's that same philosophy of like, can we create a separate space to be able to do that?
00:11:00
Speaker
And so while the organization continues to do their design and delivery work, that's the goal of the caregiving lab, to ask these more exploratory sort of future horizon-driven questions.
Exploring Cultural Beliefs in Healthcare
00:11:12
Speaker
But I think one of the founding sort of projects that we worked on was I thought well-named, not by me, but it was called Not a Blank Slate. So basically the question was, we're delivering sort of health education classes via the nurses to the patients and caregivers who are in their care so that when they go back home, they can continue their care, not have to be readmitted, things like that.
00:11:36
Speaker
But the question was, when they come into us, we're sort of assuming that they are blank slates and we're saying, here's what you need to do when you go back. But actually, most of the people who we train are adults and they are not blank slates through their lives. They have imbibed certain values, certain perceptions about health, what makes you feel bad, what makes you feel better, and their understanding of either the disease or the condition that they have.
00:12:02
Speaker
a circumstance they're in. So the project was sort of exploring what preconceived notions do these people hold about health, about care, about diseases, and how does that intersect or interfere with what they're learning from medical professionals.
00:12:19
Speaker
And I think what we found sometimes is that, especially in a country like India, especially in rural areas, I mean, even in urban areas, we grow up with so much of Sometimes accurate, but very often inaccurate ideas of how our bodies work and what makes you feel better and worse.
00:12:37
Speaker
And we would find that often these sort of cultural beliefs, sometimes superstitions work directly at odds with what nurses were telling them. yeah So now actually you have them in a room and you're having them choose between like ancestral knowledge and their family values versus healthcare advice that this stranger wants.
00:12:57
Speaker
who actually some of them don't really trust so is telling them. And you're going to pick the thing that you're familiar with. You're going to pick your family values. yeah yeah And when you go back home, those are being reinforced, right? So you might have kind of gotten this and gotten somewhat convinced in that moment. But when you go home, relatives are going to come see you and they're going to give you a whole bunch of other advice. And they're going to be like, I know this person who...
00:13:25
Speaker
had the same thing and and they're fine now because they did X. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And there's such deep relationship of trust between you and your community or you and your sort of the guru that you went to. And I think there is also historically distrust with the medical community.
00:13:46
Speaker
So yeah that was a really interesting sort of project where it wasn't as clear outcomes as some of the previous ones, again, because this was a very early project. We were figuring out who we were, how we disseminated information.
00:13:58
Speaker
And what outcome means and how it will be kind of consumed. That's in its own kind of iterative process also. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.
Making Research Insights Engaging
00:14:11
Speaker
I think what I'm curious about is what happens after the research? you know You've done the research, you've done the analysis, you've got some insights.
00:14:22
Speaker
Yeah. And you kind of mentioned it briefly and I have these in front of me. wow. oh ra They're beautiful. They're in my bookshelf right here all the time.
00:14:34
Speaker
This was interesting output. So talk to us about that. And how does this output make its way into the world, into the Noora team? And what happens with something like that? Because that seems to be the slip between the cup and the lint.
00:14:48
Speaker
yeah Yeah, for sure. I think that's a very pertinent point because this type of research often does collect dust in a Google Drive. in a There's so much of actually valuable research, I'm sure, that's just kind of sitting around because it's hard to read, um difficult to find. i think at the time, the person who was the director of the caregiving lab This was something she had clearly seen as a sort of point of friction throughout her career and was very, very sort of bullish about we need to share this. I think she made sure we had like visual designers on the team and making sure that people see stuff and people will only see things if it looks beautiful and is compelling to them visually and has that hook.
00:15:31
Speaker
And obviously the content is very robust and rigorous, but you need that all humans will look at pretty things. I think with Project Nightingale, and I'm so glad that you have those. those as these guys um yeah it was what i mean, no credit to me. I am not at all a visual designer.
00:15:47
Speaker
But essentially what we did was one of the things that came out of this project were, we know the design principles that you need to sort of employ if you're working with nurses. Yeah.
00:15:58
Speaker
And for Noura, we said Noura as an organization needs to make certain shifts in the way we perceive work with nurses to be very aligned with those principles. yeah Now, the thing is, those shifts are an organizational thing. So, you know, you have to move from looking at nurses as like this one person army to making sure that they actually have an army surrounding them that will help them deliver their work. Those kinds of, I think there were four more.
00:16:26
Speaker
but What that shift is can look different for different people. So in an organization like Nura, where the teams serve incredibly different functions, their day-to-day work looks really different. Someone is on the ground in some remote part of India in a hospital observing a session. Someone else is in the headquarters on a laptop and designing things.
00:16:49
Speaker
How that shift embodies itself and manifests in your team and your role needs to look very, very different. So there's no point us as a team saying, you need to do so-and-so thing. So I think one of the things that we did that I thought worked well was we conducted sessions with everyone across the organization, all the different types of teams to sort of say, here's the work that we've done.
00:17:11
Speaker
Here's what we learned. And here are the shifts that we think we need to make as an organization to serve our nurses better. let's sort of workshop what that shift looks like for you in your day-to-day. So if you're on a monitoring and evaluation team, how does that shift look for you? How will you work more with nurses? Like how do you bring nurses more into your day-to-day?
00:17:32
Speaker
And so they were then sort of owning what that looked like and how it would show up in their day-to-day lives. And they came up with this diverse range of solutions for some teams it was like yes we will do this in a more fun way we will build gamification into our app or whatever but then for teams that weren't as nurse facing or didn't contact nurses as much it was a completely different output and how does that look like if you have something that is so nurse focused and you are the finance team i don't know fairly abstract connections what does that end up looking like
00:18:09
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's such a good question. And if we did actually do a session, I think, with some of the more, those like function running the organization teams.
00:18:20
Speaker
think one of the teams was even like, can we in our office have the pictures of the nurses and some of the quotes from... the work that you did. So we have that like daily connect with who it is ultimately that we're working with. And it can be small things like that. I'm sure there's probably larger shifts that can be made as well.
00:18:38
Speaker
But for some of those teams, it's like we need ways to on a day-to-day basis connect with this larger mission. Because otherwise, what's the difference between me being on a finance team here versus in Barclays? Yeah, yeah, And the interesting thing is connecting with the larger mission means connecting with the individual.
00:18:56
Speaker
Because the larger mission, you can put it in vinyl on the wall. Our vision is a world which la la la. Right? But that particular nurse and something that they said helps make that real. Right? Like that vision or mission that you're kind of looking at. That's that's It's such a powerful thing because like you're right, especially in governance kind of function in organizations, you can get extremely disconnected with what's actually happening. And that that has a knock on an effect on the people that you are, I don't know, releasing reimbursements for things like that.
00:19:35
Speaker
Yeah, interesting. And so Just kind of carrying on on this topic of mechanisms, I'm really curious about where are working right now and how is that set up?
00:19:47
Speaker
I think just set that up for us because when you first told me about it, I couldn't believe something like this exists. So please, anase us. Yes.
Innovative Collaboration in Social Care
00:19:56
Speaker
Okay. So where I work now, it's called the London Office of Technology and Innovation. So Lottie for short, rolls off the tongue better. And it's essentially an organization that works with local government in London to help counsel sort of collaborate better and work more innovatively I think the curious thing about London as a city is it's one city, but it's divided into 32 boroughs.
00:20:23
Speaker
And each borough has its own local government that functions as its own. and It almost functions as its own independent city in some ways. but Really? Yes. They're not just line departments or something. They almost have their own budgets and their own decision making and all of that.
00:20:39
Speaker
Yes, they're like completely separate self-contained local governments that are replicating the same functions across those different boroughs. Okay. But the idea, I think, is essentially you can cater to your local residents' needs. I think culture, demographics, all of those things look so different in different parts of the city.
00:21:00
Speaker
And so this is meant to sort of serve that local context better. There's pros and cons for sure. I think one of the cons of this kind of system, which actually I think brought Lottie to life, is that because you all function as 32 different independent local councils, there's also a lot of things that are maybe being duplicated that are things that actually don't make sense to do 32 separate times. So a big thing is like climate change, for example, doesn't respect the boundaries of your borough. So if the air is polluted, it's going to be polluted for everyone. There's no point trying and solving it.
00:21:34
Speaker
as independent little councils. So that's the goal really to help Burrows innovate and collaborate where it makes sense to, where there's more power in doing things together.
00:21:45
Speaker
So the team's been around for five-ish years and initially there was a lot of setting up foundations work. So how do we make sure like we're doing data sharing stuff well, that plumbing work essentially I think is what they call it, more of the tech and data stuff. And in the last year or two,
00:22:01
Speaker
we've been focusing more on the innovation piece of it. I function here as a service designer. And so, yeah, I'm the only service designer on the team. We all have very, very different skill sets.
00:22:13
Speaker
And the nice thing is I think we grow based on what these local authorities that we work with tend to need the most. Yeah. So some of the work that we've been doing for the last year and a half has been a lot of this qualitative research to understand challenges that local councils are facing. And then how do we bring new methods to innovate and do things slightly differently? It's interesting because...
00:22:37
Speaker
local government, like with any government, I think it is a little hard to innovate, especially in services that are like health and social care, which is like, this is people's lives and their health.
00:22:48
Speaker
Innovation feels very new and risky. And like, you can't be, I mean, you should never be callous about innovation, but especially when it's to do with people's lives and health. So we've been trialing a few different ways to approach things here.
00:23:01
Speaker
So one of the recent projects was an approach that we're trying called the sandbox approach. And I recognize that sandbox means something very specific in like a tech world. yeah The sort of ethos is the same, which is basically, can we take a challenge and de-risk it in a sort of neutral third environment, replicate that situation, that scenario, that service, and play around with it and see what changes we can make, who we can bring into the conversation. to trial new things, build them out a little bit, and if they make sense, put them back into the context and hopefully fix part of the issue.
00:23:39
Speaker
So we tried this approach, I think, starting August-ish last year. We focused on social care, which is actually a very interesting service that the local government in the UK delivers, and I'm sure in many other countries, but definitely not in India. I think in India, we depend more on like the kindness of people, on family and those community structures to support people who are either growing old or are dealing with chronic illness.
00:24:05
Speaker
But here, social care is a service where basically you support people to live independently and in their own homes if they have chronic illnesses or a disability or just are aging and in need help and support.
00:24:17
Speaker
And what does that service look like? like What would you get as part of the service? Yeah, you could get all kinds of things, actually. So it could be things like occupational therapy.
00:24:28
Speaker
It could be things like someone coming and helping you with medication management. But it could also be carers coming and helping you with personal hygiene and personal care. So going to the toilet and showering. It could also be someone helping you with cleaning up your house and helping you do your groceries. So it really varies. And it depends on what you need to be able to live independently. Yeah.
00:24:48
Speaker
And i think it's an incredible service. When I try to place this back in the context of India, it's wild to me, actually, that the government delivers a service like this. But as you can imagine, it's now over time become a very, very overstretched, overburdened service. We're living longer. We have more chronic illness. There's more and more people depending on it.
00:25:08
Speaker
So it's become sort of one of the biggest things that are keeping leaders in different boroughs awake at night. And so we said, OK, can we take a look at this service and use the sandbox approach to raise some of the pain points, try to see if we can fix things.
00:25:24
Speaker
So we did a lot of the good old sort of user interviews. And to us, the user was like the staff in local authorities, along with people who are drawing on the service for support.
00:25:35
Speaker
But it was also people who work in health care, because increasingly social care and health care, the boundaries have blurred. say more. when i think when the service was set up in like the 1940s, it was set up to basically make sure people at the end of their life or who were facing poverty were able to have housing, were able to have shelter, were able to have some basic care support needs.
00:25:59
Speaker
But like I said earlier, the context of the world has changed so much. That again, like there's more chronic illness, we're living much, much longer. So we need support for longer. And our understanding of health has changed. It's not just when you fall down and break your hand or when you get cancer.
00:26:17
Speaker
That's not the only thing that leads to like difficulties with health. Actually, social isolation also leads to health care problems. Yeah. So the boundaries between social care and health care are actually blurring a lot more now.
00:26:31
Speaker
And so what we did was also bring health care people into the conversation because these two systems feed each other, basically. So if something goes wrong in social care, it will result in people going to hospitals.
00:26:43
Speaker
And if people have a poor experience in hospital, they could end up with chronic illnesses that basically demands more from social care. So we try to sort of bring all of these people together and have a conversation and sort of say, let's look at the journey of one or two people across these services and unearth what are the different pain points, what are the moments of handoff that are actually not working so well right now.
00:27:06
Speaker
And let's look at the problems that people keep raising. So for example, like discharge is very slow in hospitals is a problem that people keep raising, which is true. But what is the root cause of that problem? It's because, for example, if I'm discharging you from a hospital and it turns out that after the illness you've had, you actually need some support. You can't live independently anymore.
00:27:29
Speaker
And I'm trying to search for that support for you, but it's very hard for me to find because it's either underfunded or doesn't match exactly what you need. That's the root cause. And so now I have to go to social care and say, what's the problem I can solve there to make sure that someone like Akshay coming out of a hospital has appropriate care.
00:27:47
Speaker
And that solves my discharge issue. Actually, it's not about discharging faster or processing things quickly. Yeah. You can't just like throw the person out if you haven't set up how they're going to be taken care of if all the care you were supposed to give has actually been done properly because otherwise they're going to be back there pretty soon.
00:28:11
Speaker
Yeah, it was interesting because this approach basically brought people together. and the goal was to say, you're in health, you're in social care, or you build solutions for either of these services, or you've drawn on social care yourself.
00:28:25
Speaker
Let's put you all in a room. And let's bring out that expertise and find real root causes and see how we can prototype solutions to those root causes. I think an approach to go back to our earlier point of what's a good way of showcasing user research.
00:28:40
Speaker
These are experts in the field. We didn't want to go and say, tell us from scratch the problems. We did our homework and we did all of these user interviews. But the way we chose to share that back and have them comment on it and bring nuance to it was not by like, here is our PowerPoint presentation with our insights from the user research.
Immersive Presentation of Research Findings
00:28:59
Speaker
Instead, what we did was we used immersive theater. And so we had actors. Whoa, that's on unexpected. stage It was very, I learned a lot. I hadn't envisioned working with actors before. Immersive theater was not on my 2025 bingo card ah but basically yeah yeah and we did the user research we understood the typical journeys of say two types of people who drew on health and care services we wrote those sort of narratives and those narratives brought out pain points that we had heard people talk about and on our sort of launch of the sandbox day we had two actors come and play these stories
00:29:39
Speaker
And as the audience, you had to play a role in furthering their story. So if they were having difficulty booking an appointment at a GP, you had to do something to help them solve the issue or you had to play the role of the pharmacist.
00:29:51
Speaker
And you weren't just like watching a story play out. You were being part of it. And I think the result of presenting the research in that way was one, you're feeling the problems that people are facing. It's not just theory in your head.
00:30:08
Speaker
It's like very real. Even though these are experts, I think it was good to have that like immersive moment. And the discussions for the rest of the day and actually for the subsequent months throughout that sandbox process was super grounded in like that person's story. So it wasn't just, oh, we have a discharge problem. It was, oh, Mrs. S had to sit in the hospital. She didn't know where she was going next. She was very uncertain. Her family didn't feel confident. So it was like the shift in the kinds of conversations people were having.
00:30:34
Speaker
was very much like it's about the people it's about what is difficult in that system no yeah yeah yeah But Anjali, like one question I have, right? And then I mean, I'm with you on this. This is why I guess we're doing this conversation.
00:30:50
Speaker
But I think the critique that is made very often for this sort of research, these sorts of methods is how does this play out for somebody who does not represent those two?
00:31:05
Speaker
stories or characters or the 20 people you talk to right and then that the question of sample size representation how does this represent the population like how do you deal with that because this is also not you working as a yeah consultant somewhere right you are in the system working with the system which is what is fascinating about the work you're doing with Lottie so can you speak to that a little bit I agree.
00:31:31
Speaker
The problem with personas or the story-based form of presenting research is that you anchor to one or two stories and that drives too much of the direction of the solution that you're building.
00:31:46
Speaker
I think 100% that's true. I think as a facilitator of this experience, one of the things that was our responsibility to do was to make sure that we were structuring these conversations in a way that was allowing for expansion after. So yes, you've seen the story of Mrs. S and you've seen the pain points that she's faced.
00:32:07
Speaker
Now we're going to have structured discussions. That's a jumping off point. So we're talking about like discharge is a problem or we're talking about assessments are difficult or whatever. One, do you have the people in the room who bring in that diverse perspective that then makes sure that the conversation encompasses more than just that one kind of persona?
00:32:28
Speaker
And two, I think, are you structuring the conversation so it's pushing people to think beyond just this person? So I think it is your responsibility to make sure as a designer, as a researcher, that this is being used as a jumping off point, as a useful reference.
00:32:46
Speaker
The other thing also about like people use this as argument against qualitative and for quantitative research. But I have two sort of thoughts about that. Quantitative research will tell you what is happening, but it will not tell you why. And that's the work of qualitative research. I think it's the work is to tell you why certain things are happening, why people make these certain decisions about like the needs and the emotions that are driving behaviors.
00:33:12
Speaker
It's not telling you that these four personas are all the personas in the world. The personas are a vehicle for the why. So you should focus, I think, a little bit on like the why and the behaviors that that is bringing out.
00:33:27
Speaker
The second thought I have is that quantitative data is sort of seen as this like, it is facts. And it is just the truth of the world.
00:33:37
Speaker
And it is like this pure untouched thing that gives us a real picture of the world. But really, who designed that survey that you sent out that told you the truth of the world? It was a person.
00:33:50
Speaker
who while designing that survey decided what questions went into the survey, right? Like what do they believe matters? What do they think is worth quantifying? And that's the like qualitative moment. I think that you actually don't know why those decisions were made sometimes, or it is qualitative research that helped you make the decision about what to ask in your surveys. So I think to bring it back to sort of the original point of like, yes, I think these stories can be limiting,
00:34:20
Speaker
And we need to recognize where we're using them, why we're using them and use them responsibly. They're really useful in uncovering sort of the whys under certain things.
00:34:30
Speaker
They're useful to help you reflect on why decisions were made and get to the more nuanced responses. They will not be useful in saying, let's generalize these four personas to all human beings. Correct.
00:34:44
Speaker
Correct. They're not sort of population, scale, segmentation based on behavior, but they give you an entry point into kind of investigating the why kind of behind the data or helping you ask the right questions to then quantify better.
00:35:03
Speaker
That sort of thing. There's a potential interplay there. There's a loop there potentially of... qual informing quant informing qual informing quant kind of thing i think one thing that i'm curious about and as we sort of start closing our conversation the immersive theater thing is still blowing my mind because you know i've done a little bit of improv theater and to be in the position of those two actors responding to somebody coming and doing something and then you have to kind of take where does that go right yes and where does that go and then that's
00:35:39
Speaker
Yeah, that sounds fascinating. And the sandbox itself is interesting, right, as a method. And actually, I think the tech world can let go of sandbox being their thing because i've I've seen it being used now in interesting ways, keeping the core values. I think both of these methods are fascinating. And the fact that it's backed by good old traditional sort of qualitative research, user interviews, observation, all of that, right?
00:36:08
Speaker
What I'm curious about is where is this work going? And you touched upon it a little bit when we started the conversation about iterative program design and delivery.
00:36:19
Speaker
If you can say more about that and unpack that, tell us more.
Prototyping Solutions in Lottie's Sandbox
00:36:24
Speaker
Yeah, so I think for us at Lottie, we've concluded that sort of first pilot of this new way of approaching a problem from starting with the user, starting with the experience, presented back in a new and interesting way that sparks different conversations, which was what the immersive theater was trying to do.
00:36:45
Speaker
And then we ran design sprint sessions with those same people, kept bringing more people along for the journey. And we ended up with sort of six prototypes that came out of this. So like prototypes that people felt would solve the problems that have been brought up through this process. For example...
00:37:02
Speaker
For example, one of the challenges was that, okay, this very simple moment, but like, say a person falls ill oh sorry, a person like faints and someone has to call the paramedics, call 999, the ambulance picks them up and takes them to hospital or something similar happens and they have to be taken to a care home.
00:37:23
Speaker
You have medical information, hopefully, about what are their conditions, like they fainted. Sometimes you may not. I think it depends in some places that system is much more mature, but you may not have exact information about like this person has fainted.
00:37:37
Speaker
What are the underlying health conditions that they have that could be relevant for me to know to treat them in this moment? What medications are they taking that might have interactions with whatever I do? yeah But also, if I do take them to the hospital, what else needs? Like, do they have pets at home that need to be sent somewhere? Because often when someone is in hospital, they're actually really worried about like what's happened to my dog or my cat. And that causes a lot of stress. So that was one pain point that came up. Like people will come to care homes and just be so flustered and anxious about
00:38:11
Speaker
their pets who's actually is the life of this eight-year-old woman. And so one of the solutions was to address that moment. So can we have this like QR code? You know how everyone has fridge magnets, almost everyone.
00:38:24
Speaker
We have a QR code that is just a fridge magnet. It goes onto your fridge. And if a paramedic or a carer or someone who's coming to support you needs information about you, they can scan that QR code.
00:38:36
Speaker
And of course, permission settings, all of that stuff, that governance needs to happen. But the goal would be that they can enter what has happened or what they need in that moment. So they say patient is unconscious and there's a little bit of AI is a rage. So like querying of your data that you've inputted buy that like Gen AI LLM thing and it sort of says okay you said this is the situation here is the relevant information because there's no point in a moment of process for you to have pages and pages of data about this person just tells you what's relevant yeah yeah yeah yeah and the information you need is section 2a on page five and you're never going to get that so it just like queries the right information and gives it to you and you're able to like better do whatever needs to be done including things like okay i'll drop the pet off at the neighbor's house because that's what you know is comfortable for that person so they call that like the mighty magnet and that was one thing that came out of this process interesting how
00:39:33
Speaker
I think the nice thing has been some of these solutions that came out of the process already exist in some form. They're not all completely new, novel, radical. Like different organizations did come up to us at the end of this and say, that prototype that you developed, actually, we already do some version of this.
00:39:51
Speaker
It's great because I think that prototype has then served its function of bringing out what already exists in the ecosystem and just making that connection and saying, maybe we need to tweak this or expand it a bit more.
00:40:03
Speaker
to cover this use case and then we'll have covered our bases here. And maybe it needs a little bit of design and tech support and then kind of saying that it exists in one of the boroughs. How do you take it across the board?
00:40:17
Speaker
Right. Maybe that's the function of the prototype also is everybody else says, hey, that's amazing. And then somebody says, I have it. I've had it for five years. And then fascinating. And so then what happens now? So these prototypes are out there.
00:40:31
Speaker
What happens then? So I think for us now, it's like we've done a sort of proof of concept and the goal is to take this and say, this is what we've learned from it. Here's what works. Here's what needs to be developed further. And I think where we are is looking for, is this a thing that we can find funding for to like do in other areas of work as well?
00:40:53
Speaker
One exciting thing I think that's coming out from central government recently is they're trying to run like more of a test and learn approach. Yeah. And I think the power of central governments across the world is when they decide to do something, that scale is already there. It's so exciting when there's recognition of a method by such a big body.
00:41:14
Speaker
So we're looking at like, they've said that there's interest in this test and learn approach. It's very, very close to what the central government, I think, is hoping for. So I think that's one direction this could go in.
00:41:27
Speaker
I think it's a little bit of pausing and now seeing how do we build this into a sustainable approach that's useful mainly to other the people that in local government delivering services. Yeah, yeah.
00:41:40
Speaker
Makes sense. Anjali, so just to close out the conversation, I'm just reflecting on our conversation so
The Future of Qualitative Research Methods
00:41:49
Speaker
far. And, you know, if I can say that you've operated in these couple of very high intent spaces, whether that is Lottie and a space that it created for you to work with methods like immersive theater and to really deeply look at social care through this lens of service design or Moora with the care labs for you to be able to explore what it means with Project Nightingale, what it means for caregivers in a certain way.
00:42:27
Speaker
When you kind of step back from that, from these sorts of lab-like environments, I'm just wondering what does the acceptance of these sorts of methods or outputs look like beyond these slightly more lab-like environments?
00:42:46
Speaker
And what does it look like when you're trying to engage with non-designers in less, let's say, conducive environments? oh I love that more and more people are seeing the value of it and the notion that qualitative research is just cute and interesting and pulls at your heartstrings is sort of fading a little bit, hopefully, and it's seen as a more serious and robust thing.
00:43:12
Speaker
I think my hope for it is that everyone who builds or works with either people or builds for people that deliver services that touches people, which I'd like to think is pretty much all of us at the end of the day. It's like there's a person using what you're building. Yeah.
00:43:28
Speaker
At least has more of that human-centered approach in the back of their mind. Because I believe like whatever you do is an act of design, right? It's not just the work of three or four people. It's any decision you make is a design decision. It's going to affect people.
00:43:46
Speaker
So I'm hopeful that like more and more people will be conscious of it. I don't actually think that it needs to become everyone's responsibility to do this work. It'll be nice if meetings are more engaging, approaches to things are more few people-centered.
00:44:03
Speaker
And that becomes almost a second nature way of doing things. But at the same time, I also do think that it needs to be some people's full time job to be able to have the capacity, the mind space to do this work and bring it to everyone else. Yeah.
00:44:18
Speaker
Yeah. Wow. I think to me, what I'm also taking away, and I think we're sort of seeing that happen slowly, it is in slightly more forward thinking spaces, the role of the designer is changing from the person creating the artifact.
00:44:35
Speaker
to the one who's sort of acting as a translator, acting as a facilitator for people to engage and kind of bring that out. And I think that's what you're saying that these sorts of approaches will percolate that way. It might not be the whole thing, but it's also shifts in how we think about our role and everybody else's role in designing sort of interventions.
00:45:01
Speaker
Yeah, I think even for this sandbox approach, the prototypes I talked about, yes, ChatGPT, Claude were my best friends in that last week of like actually building the prototype.
00:45:11
Speaker
But it will not do the work for you. I think all of what you prompted with, that all comes from the facilitation and the work that went in before it yeah yeah Yeah, that makes sense.
00:45:23
Speaker
Anjali, thank you so much for this really rich conversation. And even though I knew some of your previous work at Noora Health, I still gained such a deeper understanding of it. And of course, all this new work that you've been doing at Lottie.
00:45:38
Speaker
I feel like our conversation was just packed with so many ideas that are deeply relevant to anyone who's working with qualitative data, doing service design, especially when they're doing it in terms of public systems and designing for impact.
00:45:55
Speaker
I just wanted to to kind of ah share a few of the things that I'm walking away with from this conversation. And I think the biggest thing is just about the fact that it's not enough for research insights to sit in reports.
00:46:11
Speaker
There's a role for research teams to play in translating those insights in a way that stakeholders really can connect with those insights and take it into their day-to-day work.
00:46:22
Speaker
Can you share such great examples of graphic artifacts for that? And that fantastic example around immersive theater to bring stories of real users and make it alive so that, you know, people can actually interact with personas. And and that just felt it so powerful and so engaging.
00:46:45
Speaker
And it really then, I think, helps to shift conversations from abstract problems or really nifty statements to That can, I think, lead to more grounded, empathetic decisions. And I think that's what this is all about.
00:47:01
Speaker
One big other point I'm just taking away is the need for us to kind of be careful and responsible with these narratives or personas.
00:47:11
Speaker
I think they're very useful for driving action, but we should treat it only as a starting point because it's not necessarily a full representation of every kind of reality.
00:47:23
Speaker
And if we're more conscious of how we structure these conversations, how we structure the Application of what has been designed, combining qualitative with quantitative insights, it can really help ensure that these solutions we are building are both empathetic and more broadly relevant.
00:47:44
Speaker
I think in short, I'm taking away is that designing for impact means designing with humility. And it means to be able to listen deeply, experiment thoughtfully, and really hold space for, you know, stories and systems to meet each other.
00:48:01
Speaker
And that's the way we're going to sort of work towards better outcomes. Yeah, exactly. And that's the episode. I want to leave you with a question.
00:48:12
Speaker
What's a decision you're making that might just change if you had the story behind the numbers? Give it some thought. Anyways, thank you for listening and do check out the other episodes in the series.
00:48:24
Speaker
Our first season focuses on qualitative data and research and we have a fantastic lineup of guests. If you found this valuable, please subscribe and share it with a friend who might find our conversation interesting.
00:48:37
Speaker
If you'd like to learn more, you can visit our website getdots.in or write to us at hello at uloilabs.in and follow us on LinkedIn for updates.
00:48:48
Speaker
Until next time, I'm Akshay signing off.