[ACS 03] Blackbuck is designing for technology challenged users

 

Kedar Nimkar:

Welcome to a brand new episode of Audiogyan case studies. Today I have Viraj Varma with us. Viraj is an architect and self taught user experience designer who graduated from IIT Roorkee. He’s currently leading the design team at Blackbuck, an online marketplace seamlessly connecting shippers and carriers across India and working with truck owners and drivers of this highly unorganised sector. Today, we are here to discuss what goes into designing an experience for these technologically challenged users. So thank you very much for giving us your time, man. It’s a real pleasure to have you on Audiogyan.

 

Viraj Verma:

Thank you so much. It’s awesome to be here and share my experience with Audiogyan.

 

Kedar Nimkar:

Sure. Thanks a lot. I would like to tell our listeners that we met in the Designup conference and he shared a lot of insights, what he’s building right now, what are the challenges, and I really wanted to just document what his process is because he’s actually going down to the grass-root level of India, tier two tier three cities and designing something really awesome there. So the first question which I wanted to ask you is what does blackbuck do essentially? What is the company about?

 

Viraj Verma:

Yeah, it’s that basically blackbuck is the Uber for trucks for India. The trucking industry in India is huge, like 100 billion dollar sector itself. So on a very high level, when merchants need to transport their goods from A to B, that’s when they hire these fleet owners, which is basically someone who is owning a single truck or double truck or five trucks or 10 trucks, and like that they also have loyal drivers. So these are the people you see on the on your road trips. There’s one fact which I want to tell you that 85% of the movement on the national highways in India are completely commercial; think about it when you are going on a road you’re watching the truck drivers, the roads are actually meant for them. 

This is one of the things, this entire process is a very unstructured, unorganised process and it’s a very traditional industry which has been existing in India since last 50 years now. One other thing is that this entire network acts as a circulatory system for India and it is very important that we bring in some efficiency into this long lost technologically challenged sector, where nothing has been done nothing really technological or any digital interactions have been given to them. So this is where Blackbuck comes into the picture. What we are trying to do is we are trying to infuse the sector with our technological products so that the entire process can become efficient and all the stakeholders can interact with each other magically. That is what our company is doing basically.

 

Kedar Nimkar:

Just to set the context, when you said 85% of this sector, moving on the roads is all logistics, you remember we were speaking about if you can share some sort of insights as to this, if Amazon, Swiggy, Uber and people who are actually on the road, how much percent of traffic does it today consume as opposed to the movers and Packers kind of things and then the bigger sector where people talk about groceries and things like that. So how is this market in terms of percentage, if you can share some numbers? 

 

Viraj Verma:

I want to make a differentiation over here in the category that we are actually in. So when I say that merchants are transferring their load from A to B I am actually talking about huge traders who are moving raw materials or moving finished goods for larger, longer distances between the states. There are other players as well, there are Swiggy’s, there are Porter’s, there are other players who are doing intrastate or inter city kind of movement but our movement is from state to state which actually contributes to 85% of the entire logistics sector. So if you are making a pie chart, this entire region is actually the long haul logistics the sector in which we are in and the rest of the pie has been has been taken by other players and other stuff like movement of goods. 

 

Kedar Nimkar:

What kind of goods are these, just to know?

 

Viraj Verma:

It can be anything. There are all raw materials which are going from, let’s say, India to South Africa. So they are being transported from UP to Gujarat first and then being shipped to Saudi Arabia or South Africa. It can be coal which is coming from South Africa and which is going to the factories of India, which is a little cheap coal. So this comprises everything except the perishable goods. There’s a separate category, which is perishable goods, but everything else is kind of your goods movement which is happening. 

 

Kedar Nimkar:

So wood, steel, coal?

 

Viraj Verma:

Wood, steel, coal, iron, iron rods, everything, even beverages. This is a 130 List of 137 items that we have right now on the platform which we are doing.

 

Kedar Nimkar:

Do you want to slightly highlight more on the kind of challenges which you have or let’s take a step back and we’ll start off with the design part of it. How big is the design team?

 

Viraj Verma:

Blackbuck has been in existence since last three years. I joined them 1.5 years back, and at that time they were no designers. So I was the first designer and after that we have grown to a team of five members, now, full time members in the Bangalore office. And yes, we are hiring further.

 

Kedar Nimkar:

That will be a plug in at the end of this. Can you tell us what are the main challenges while designing interfaces for this and you can go as deep as you want because we shared a lot of things offline, but if you can just articulate them to tell us what kind of challenges are there because from my understanding you are designing for two to three different types of stakeholders in this entire ecosystem. So can you touch upon them and tell us?

 

Viraj Verma:

Since we are defining interfaces for a large portion of our stakeholders every screen presents a new challenge, every screen is solving some problem, which is again a problem. So in a world where majority of your audience is either a first time smartphone user or first time app user or both, imagine how difficult it would be to make an illiterate truck driver conquer the idea of digital touchscreen or delete dustbin icon. The entire problem was full of challenges but when I joined I actually went for a trip I went to five states, I travelled around 9000 kilometres by road by and I was just meeting all these truck drivers and the truck owners that gave a lot of fundamental insights as to what their business actually is and what how can we translate that research into our design ideas. So yes, there were challenges but we were making ensuring that we are following a certain design process while we are creating the interfaces for them, who are essentially very new to the concept of any digital product. Some of the things that we did were, for example, how do you explain an error message to this kind of an audience? What is the term that we commonly use like ‘oops, there is an error’ or ‘sorry, something went wrong’? How do you design all those interactions from ground up for this kind of an audience.

 

Kedar Nimkar:

Sorry to interrupt here, these kinds of audiences, there’s first of all the truck drivers, and then are there any more people who are interacting with the system?

 

Viraj Verma:

Yeah, there are multiple stakeholders which are there in this entire trucking industry. First of all there are of course the shippers who actually want to hire those fleet of trucks, then there are the owners of those fleet of trucks, who are again, as you might have seen those transport nagars, in a very tier 2 kind of setup or outside your cities. What happens is all these truck owners are actually scattered around the towns and tier 2 cities of India and they are the stakeholders, they are the ones who are using one of the apps for us and making the entire process efficient, but then again, there are truck drivers. So there are like these 3-4 main stakeholders which are there and who are using the suit of apps that we are running for them. 

This is the audience which is there, some might might not even know English, someone might not even know Hindi beyond a certain level, so they are they are very used to using the receipts or the daily transactional activities that they do so that they’re they’re akin to that kind of inner language. If you introduce any other language like ‘oops’ it will all go down the drain. So how do you solve those problems? How do you think about that? 

What we did was, for example, in the error part was that we were very direct in our approach, and we were very actionable. Let’s say that your internet is down so it would be ‘please tap this icon or check your connections, something like that. We were very, very prompt in the message that we were giving, and we were only making sure ensuring that they are actionable and nothing is just sort of pleasantries.

 

Kedar Nimkar:

So what does the error message look like?

 

Viraj Verma:

We had a traffic signal with a red light on and a very actionable crisp message that ‘your internet is not working’, something like that. That too in Hindi, ‘aapka internet kaam nahi kar raha hai’. So it was Hindi that we use in our day to day lives, nothing flashy.

 

Kedar Nimkar:

And you also mentioned about them getting agitated because certain things are not working so is there any other insight to be shared on that? While designing?

 

Viraj Verma:

What we made sure was that there were two sets of user first; one was the one was the set of user which was used to using the smartphones and one was completely new, using our app as the first app in their life. So what we made sure, before even we were developing that product, was we made prototypes and we were testing those prototypes with both kind of audiences; so we are testing it with someone who will have a lesser learning curve and you are testing it with someone who will have a very steep learning curve. We ensured that a user like us, someone who is not used the app ever before is very comfortable and goes through the app very naturally. And we never intended to create any ambiguous interactions in the app as well. So it was like an ATM machine. We thought of something to create something like an ATM machine where it gives you the voice feedback as well. So we actually integrated our app with Google’s API, a Text to Speech API; there was a readout like ‘aap ko yahan jana hai, sham ke sade saath tak’. This was all possible because of those deep technologies that we’re using but essentially everything was coming out as very simple and very toned down.

 

Kedar Nimkar:

And what were the learnings while you were on the road trip? 

 

Viraj Verma:

So what I wanted to do was to understand how these players are actually playing within themselves; what is the role of WhatsApp? Or what is the role of text messages, etc? What are the tools that they are using? This was a completely new experience for me. While meeting I went with a questionnaire but I had to dumb down the questionnaire somewhere in between. The idea which helped me was that I wanted to follow all those processes, traditional processes that we as designers follow while we are back in our offices but at the same time how to collect that data. So there were two problems: what methodology to follow while you’re designing for this set of user and how will you recruit these users because they are always on the move. You can easily recruit someone from Amazon or Flipkart but how do you approach this kind of user? 

So what we did was we stuck to the basics of the design part and we came out with the questions that we wanted to ask. What we did was a step ahead, we created a set of conversation out of those questions that if I want to ask this question what is the conversation that I need to strike. We did this extra step of creating a script or a conversation around it. And then a user equivalent was striking conversation with them; we just went ahead over Chai and sometimes even hookah. 

 

Kedar Nimkar:

So it was outside on the roadside? 

 

Viraj Verma:

Roadside, yeah dhabas. I was having a conversation and I was recording all this, then I went back and took notes out of it while backing up. So you really have to innovate how you want to gather data, but at the same time I didn’t want to reinvent anything out of the box. 

 

Kedar Nimkar:

Coming to that reinvent part, how are you trying to solve these challenges? I mean, since you have some sort of insights into how things are in that space, what are your steps you have been taking so far within the organisation, within Blackbuck, to try and solve these challenges?

 

Viraj Verma:

There are two aspects to this; first is your organisation itself needs to step a forward foot and say that let the customer experience be the key where you differentiate from all other products or all other services that are out there in the market and I was lucky enough to be working in an organisation which felt that yes, user experience is the key to crack this space. So that was a challenge which was not really a challenge for me. Now, the second challenge to actually implement the learnings in a very fast paced environment is again something which (is tough) and all the wheels are moving at the same time. So there are truckers, there are shippers, there are truck drivers and everything has to be well coordinated. Essentially, a second part of the learning was how to bring all those business challenges or business problems that are there and translate that to the product so that the product is really simple to the end users who are using it. And we have not created something very complex, so we wanted to go in that direction. 

 

Kedar Nimkar:

You briefly touched upon dumbing down the questions, dumbing down of the interface communication which is happening. Any other insights in terms of that because we spoke that they are not even aware of Google Maps; so how to navigate, how the traffic looks like? And any other insights on which has helped you from your learnings translate into the design language which you are using.

 

Viraj Verma:

What we are doing in the system is we are focusing a lot on the drivers; we have actually put a lot of sensors on the truck. So we are measuring a lot of data, which otherwise (would be lost) because the truck driver is actually the pseudo owner of the truck, he stays on the truck for 24 days in a month or so and he sleeps in the truck. So the data is there but in a very traditional scenario a fleet owner doesn’t know where his truck driver is; broker might be misusing the truck driver for a fuel theft or something like that. So all those activities are in this area but what we are trying to do is we are trying to infuse all the original tracks with more technology and more sensors which can give us back the data that about how, where are the drivers stopping? Where are the drivers? Interestingly, we have started using digital fuel cards where you actually don’t need a fuel card at all. The truck can actually go there and there will be an OTP on his mobile number and the fuelling would be done instantly. So that is how seamless we have made the entire process with no interaction at all. 

Another thing is about the toll. So when a truck actually passes through a toll, if they’re using the fast tag toll card, which we are giving to them, they can actually pass without paying anything, cash or anything like that, they can just pass through it and money will be automatically deducted by from their chips. This is this what we are trying to do, bringing the modern technology into a sector which is not very looked upon. 

 

Kedar Nimkar:

Wow, interesting. I would like to slightly deep dive in one of the questions; one of your critical users, as you mentioned, truck drivers are, as we know, they are either completely drunk from whatever experience I have at least, or frustrated in a road rage because I’ve done a lot of trips from Bombay, Bangalore, at least on the road. So I’ve seen them right from the last 10 years. How are you handling errors or exceptions for them? I mean, this is a slightly nuanced question. But yeah, this might share some insights on the process itself.

 

Viraj Verma:

Actually that is a misconception. Even these drivers are trying to just do their duties, do their trucking for 24 days in a month and go back to their homes, happy with their family without any accident, even they don’t want to cause any trouble. The thing is that these people themselves have been tormented by the traffic police or even their owners. And  for the duty that they are doing they’re paid close to nothing. So that is what the condition really is. We have given them a flexibility to choose their leaves across the month in our app. So what we are saying is that you can schedule whenever you want to work, whenever you want to go home, we are giving them that flexibility with us. And we are also making the truck more high tech; we are infusing one of the solutions that came out of our hackathon, a black box for a truck that when there’s a crash, when there was damage on the truck, the mobile app would actually start recording the video and alert the authorities, alert the hospitals nearby, typically which takes hours and hours after after the accident. We have the data now with us. So the things that slowly and slowly we are touching upon, understanding the problems and hitting those with solutions. 

 

Kedar Nimkar:

Wow, that’s really interesting. I am getting more curious about actually wanting to see the app itself. 

 

Viraj Verma:

I will definitely show you. 

 

Kedar Nimkar:

So what has been your biggest learning as a designer in this, while designing this Blackbuck app?

 

Viraj Verma:

We as designers, we must take the problem with all its unique aspects, with all its constraints which are there and think about new and fresh solutions instead of aiming for a slightly better product; we should not just simply look for inspirations in a US based product or a Chinese based product. Whenever we are starting a project, we will actually trust the design process and accept the problem with all its constraints and blend them together to create something actually new. So in this way it makes the entire process very enjoyable. And you can actually see the results which you initially intended for. I think that has been really the biggest learning for me that when given a problem, we should always inspect it with fresh eyes and try to solve it with using all the design tools and it will really end up in something unique. 

 

Kedar Nimkar:

Yeah because typically when a person starts, it starts with the referencing first. So I think we will cover that question later. You also spoke about your travel across India to understand. But if we want to slightly, dig deeper into understanding how do you do your user research? Because now you have a set of learnings and if you can also tell me how many people have you on your team who do specifically user research? Because there’s continuous learning; this industry is 50 years old so there’s a lot more to comprehend, a lot more to generate data out of. So how does that user research part work?

 

Viraj Verma:

Okay so as I said I was the first one in the design team at Blackbuck. The first step of research that I did was travelling across geographies, understanding what is the what are the minimum minor differences while I’m talking to Punjab fleet owner versus a Gujarat fleet owner. I was actually digging deep trying to understand what their lives are really like around the industry that they’re in. That was the first set of research parameters that we were collecting about while we were making personas, while we finally were identifying the problems. After doing that what we did was we compile all those things into our prototype and we went out there testing back again, giving them the app even before launching it so that it eliminated a lot of our assumptions. For example, there are a lot of assumptions that you can make while sitting in a AC office in Bangalore that these truck drivers, they don’t have, let’s say, bank accounts, but what we found out was completely different. These people do have bank accounts, it’s just that they are not using it, but we are we actually made sure that we are actually transferring all the amounts that we need to transfer to their bank accounts. So this is one of the learnings which you only get after you go onto the ground, talk to your users, understand them really well. 

Some of the other challenges, where will he be able to make out a button for example, what is the concept of button for someone like him? So what we did was, we made a very different design system wherein we took a lot of aspects of the product that they were already using, which were only WhatsApp and Facebook as far as my research. We took a lot of those elements and we tried to make our own design system for such an audience. And in the process we actually eliminated all the textual buttons, we eliminated anything that is very cluttered to them. It actually came out really well. This is all based on the research that we did before launching the app which actually solved a lot of problems for us. Now, after launching again, how do you make him to update the app? And how do you develop a product which is already out there with all these constraints that we know. Even if you maybe move a button from here to there, there might be a lot of commotion, that samaj nahi aah raha hai. So we were very careful, even while we were incrementally improving the app; we were not touching the aspects which are working well for us. We were only adding on features which we really thought and another best part about incremental process is that you can build something which is high priority for such kind of audience to actually low priorities, and etc, don’t have to clutter the product really that much. So that incremental step journey really helped. And, yeah, all of this coming together, I can say that when I did my research back again, I went for a trip again, two months back, and when I was there interviewing with someone who has really earned 17,000 rupees to 20,000 rupees in a month’s time with us, whom we have tripled the income for. So meeting all those people, it was really a validation that yes, what we have created actually works, and people are actually multiplying their incomes out of it. It was all coming into pieces.

 

Kedar Nimkar:

I don’t know whether you have seen Aankhon Dekhi

 

Viraj Verma:

No, I have not seen that

 

Kedar Nimkar:

So in that the movie premise is that there’s a guy who decides that he will not believe until he sees; that’s how he based his philosophy in life. And his daughter is going to get married so he designs an invitation card; typically, an invitation cards has Ganpati and since he doesn’t believe in any of those things he really makes a super minimal send looking invitation card. And that’s how that somehow connects me to this portion. Because when you are against all the biases and purely implementing your learnings, it becomes truly minimal because you’re keeping the things which actually matter, and then removing all the fluff. So yeah, I mean, I’m sure the product looks minimal in itself.

 

Viraj Verma:

That’s a good analogy to make.

 

Kedar Nimkar:

Yeah, so Viraj since there isn’t anyone doing much for these tier two or tier three cities or users, if I may say, what is your source of inspiration? I mean, how do you refer, I’m sure you must not be referring to a lot of things but for people like us who have worked in Ola, Cleartrip, and Bookmyshow, and other places, they have like a natural incline towards go to Dribbble, checkout certain interaction patterns, read medium posts, and then come up with some sort of interaction or a design. So what is your source of inspiration in here?

 

Viraj Verma:

At first the thought was really scary, that how to design for an audience which has never used any app other than Facebook or WhatsApp? How should I make us very superior, a design system like Airbnb for such kind of an audience? Or was was there even a need for creating that kind of design system? Does that mean that I have to create very dumbed down designs? Or do I have to make crappy UI? It all led to a very existential existential crisis for me that whether my UX career is on the downward spiral. So that was the mindset for me when I started this project but the answer really is that not having direct inspirations is sometimes good, you can create something very unique. When you really follow the design process, somewhere it says that you have to make something where the learning curves are not steep and you have to make something very familiar. So taking those advices we actually realised that the percentage of audience using smartphones, use Facebook and WhatsApp for 99% of the time; this was really the key to build a system or design system. 

What we did was we picked up some elements from Facebook and WhatsApp, which they are using and which they are used to seeing on a daily basis and we created our own design system. This actually helped both kinds of users, the users who are using the smartphones and the users who were not familiar with smartphones at all. There’s only one button on the screen so we actually asked questions like ‘agar aapko aage jaana hai to kahan dabaayenge?’. So we actually went to that detail from ensuring that the system actually works or the interaction actually works. So yeah, we did all those things. Before the stunt I never believed in the idea of a tier to tier three setup in India using digital products for something useful. But my view has completely changed, that it is not their fault but actually our fault when we are making products; a great product by definition adds value to the lives of everyone who is using it, but if a person is not able to use it then it’s a designer’s fault that he is not getting the value that was actually for him. So I think we actually need to look from those angles while we are solving some problems that are very unconventional or very India specific.

 

Kedar Nimkar:

Beautiful. In fact, one of the one of the reasons why I wanted to have this Audiogyan is also because since I’ve started Audiogyan I’ve been interviewing a lot of different types of designers. But when I interview people, at least professors from IDC and others, like I interviewed Uday Athavankar and Gopal Ray and other people, all of them are trying to solve a problem for the the people who really need it. So when we talk about ergonomics I was in this utopian world of saying ergonomics toh chair hoti hai, pencil hoti hai, how do you design for things like that; I had very superficial questions but their answers gave me a lot of insights. He gave me an example where there’s a brick worker who squats and make 600 or 700 bricks a day which is not an ergonomic position to sit and work on. So how do you design a system for that where a person will stand and can be much more effective, much more productive, and also have a longer life of his own as well? That that’s really inspiring. 

Actually, just given the time there were last two questions which I have since you’re actually solving a problem, a real world problem which is sort of slightly uncool, as you also mentioned ki existential crisis aah gaya so what keeps you going? Because it’s not very glamorous, if I can use that word. A person who’s designing for a tier three, like Ludhiana main truck driver ke liye design kar raha hoon, and one who’s designing like an ultra modern Myntra app. So, what keeps you going and how do you keep yourself motivated? This is slightly personal, but yeah.

 

Viraj Verma:

No, no. So, well, I have actually worked on home decor and virtual credit card apps in the past which was for a very polished audience but this was a unique experience, to transform a traditional sector and infuse that with new digital tools and create a billion dollar startup, it was like an experience or a journey for me. There are so many situations in India where there is an opportunity to solve very real problems, you just go to a road trip towards the tier two, tier three towns and you will you will find a bunch of problems that we take for granted while living in the metros and cities. So, if only one can break from the status quo and can dive in with determination that we want to create quality products which actually impact their lives, it is possible. This has actually made me bolder as a designer, to voice my opinions and express them freely. So I think that has been the journey so far which has motivated me to pursue something which nobody else is pursuing. 

 

Kedar Nimkar:

Yes. Whoa, awesome. One of my hopes is that this podcast makes the listeners, the designers, aware of the kind of real challenges you’re dealing. So, any insights? Because this I hope that there are a lot of people out there who are looking for jobs also and also get sensitive to these kind of problems in India. What are your expectations from our designer community and talent, if you’re trying to acquire more, as you mentioned, so what what is that you are looking for? Because yeah, I wouldn’t mention about our requirements, but yeah.

 

Viraj Verma:

At this point I would encourage more young designers and entrepreneurs to pick up problems that they are thinking are very India specific, a solution which is too good to be true to exist for this kind of a problem; I want them to actually pursue those problems because India is a growing economy and in need of dire creative minds who can break the status quo and solve problems more innovatively; we really need that kind of a passion towards all those problems and who knows that the solution that you are building becomes the next billion dollar startup. So it is that kind of an opportunity which is lying over there but people are just not perceiving it, there can be multiple reasons, because of the status quo, because of not giving, not absorbing it enough, not even being aware that it is a problem. So, we really need to come forward out of our comfort zones and solve a lot many real world problems.

 

Kedar Nimkar:

Actually, people need to travel; one of my friends who has travelled extensively speaks almost a similar language.

 

Viraj Verma:

Travel gives you a lot of insights and a lot of perspectives.

 

Kedar Nimkar:

Alright, I think that’s a good note to end this, do you want to add any concluding thoughts about Blackbuck or maybe this could be a platform for you to reach out to some designers and ask for applying?

 

Viraj Verma:

Blackbuck has been an amazing journey, we never thought that we would come this far and create so much impact with the digital tools that we have created in the past three years. And it is growing on a very accelerated pace, we have like 1000 member team which is spread across India. And we are hiring so designers who are actually looking out for a change in Bangalore can actually get in touch with me. My email id is varmaviraj91@gmail.com Okay. So that is what our mission is, we are actually transforming this entire freight sector by bringing organisation into this highly organised informal sector and increasing the incomes of an entity like a truck driver who nobody thinks about. If you’re really passionate about solving some real world problems and want to join a startup that can give growth to your career, you should probably consider a startup like Blackbuck.

 

Kedar Nimkar:

Definitely. I hope a lot of people get inspired by listening to this and all the best for your ongoing challenges at Blackbuck and it was really nice talking to you.

 

Viraj Verma:

Same here Kedar and all the best for Audiogyan, thank you.