Innovation can be seen in many aspects of our lives. It is in the way we interact with openair areas, in distance interactions such as the internet, as well as in developing complex systems like sensors or artificial intelligence. It doesn’t matter which sort of situation, there is always one fundamental factor that never changes when it comes to innovation: the human interlocutor.
Personal Assistant
Customer: Bradesco Seguros
Goal: Develop a new personal assistant concept
Phases: → understanding → desk research → analysis → assumptions → study conclusion
Length: 3 months
A couple of years ago I was working for a project at Bradescos Seguros. I had been working there as a UX Designer, later I took on as a Business Designer and started working directly with the bank’s business areas. My main role was to facilitate business leaders using Design Thinking tools in the development of new projects.
From that period I remember those words such as: IoT, Blockchain, Data Lake and, the newest of them, Personal Assistant, were in all of the bank leaders’ minds. They all wished to know how these technologies could impact their business. That being said, my first task was to analyze how a certain personal assistant could decrease the insurance claim ratio and become useful for the clients.
Understanding
When I first received the project’s scope I realized that the proposal fully covered all of the technical aspects for the personal assistant to work. However, it didn’t really cover the user’s experience aspects. It lacked for instance regards to habits, behavior and preferences. Which are, in my opinion, fundamental when creating a relevant product.
Besides that, the leaders’ wish was to make this new personal assistant a sort of ‘guarding angel’ for the client, metaphorically speaking. It would be taken as something capable of helping clients at any time, especially preventing accidents (insurance claim). They also wanted the assistant to be able to identify micro-moments and thereby offer the solution.
Desk Research
Back then I had researched what had been done so far in terms of personal assistants and got to see that it wasn’t much as a matter of fact. The toughest challenge was to create this kind of service using the existing systems, basically because it wasn’t simple to predict risk events. Therefore, the most feasible solutions for a personal assistant would’ve had to come from systems like push notifications to notify users at certain events.
Not able to conclude which technology I could have made feasible for the personal assistant, I focused on studying to contribute to the project at that time and brought about a more structured view on the users.
Analysis
Even though technologies to develop a personal assistant seemed to be far from available, the bank’s development team looked for a framework capable of organizing the client’s micro-moments in a way that every action could have had a kind of response from the assistant.
I based my behavior analysis on Rudolf Steiner’s Anthroposophical method known as the ‘Threefold view of the human being’. This method uses Carl Jung’s archetypes to identify patterns of behavior that can be observed. If those signs were to be classified they could be gathered in a system similar to BDD (Behavior Driven Development).
This way the framework of behaviors and responses for the personal assistant could have a structure to indicate when a certain event would happen. For each “if… when…” action proposition, the personal assistant would have a suggestion like “then… or…”.
To combine these elements my reference was the three dimensions of Anthroposophy. It affirms that to comprehend the human being we need to look at its three dimensions: past, present and future. This theory is based on Plato’s “Trinity of the body”, where the parts represent: think (past), feel (present) and want (future). It allows us to do a consciousness exercise on how our actions originated.
In light of this reference, we can assume that the thoughts carry the person’s life story and background. So, it is possible to affirm that the way we react towards our present life circumstances is a result of our past experiences. The feelings host the present and it is where we reveal signs of present events, such as hunger, cold and heat. And what we want reflects the future, how we wish for things to happen, how we manifest hope, aspiration and uncertainty. It reflects future things that we wish but don’t know if will materialize.
Representation of the Trinity of the body.
Assumptions
According to Anthroposophy, the more the human being understands the thoughts, feelings and wanting influence, the more he becomes conscious of his acts. This way, it becomes easier to realize the origins of people’s reactions. Rudolf Steiner explains the need for a consciousness to exercise of our actions, so our actions don’t become automatic or led by impulsiveness.
Based on this theory my assumption was: “if we were able to classify users behavior in thinking, feeling and wanting, we would be able to identify the best notification for a certain event”. And if we were able to identify the events would we be able to decrease insurance claims, as the bank wished? And so my Anthroposophy-based study became the key to identify moments of risk that could lead to accidents.
Back then, the bank’s data showed that many car accidents happened because of the drivers’ distraction, or the “automatic mode”. Research also showed that people tended to follow the same habits and attitudes after a certain period of time, this information could help identify patterns of behavior likely to receive a prevention notification.
What if we could classify these moments to create a prediction data system and help the bank’s clients to prevent accidents?
The simulation shows the classification of the human being’s thinking, feeling and wanting expressed by reactions such as hunger, fear and cold. Theoretically, if we were able to read these signs during events, users could get warning notifications.
Conclusion
My study helped the bank’s leader to have a differentiated understanding about their clients and on how some aspects of their context influence their decisions. This study has also motivated the technical team to look for solutions that cover the vision we had for the product. Maybe a technology that could more naturally interact with users, why not? After all, my largest contribution for this project was to broaden the team’s perception of the users and present a more structured vision of the human being. And possibly change the result product from partially effective to a full positive impact product.
This was the storyboard concept that I made to help stakeholders to envision the idea.
