Launching a product in a new region is only meaningful if it’s useful to locals.
understand 2 key questions:
How did people use landmarks to navigate in India?
What types of landmarks were good navigational aides?
This is where user research came in.
Olga and Janet creatively tried several different tactics to understand how locals navigated their way through India, including:
• Calling businesses and asking them for directions to their stores
• Asking people to draw diagrams of routes to familiar places
Following people around as they navigated unfamiliar places
Sharing early designs of landmark based directions and asking for feedback
used landmarks to navigate in a few key ways:
Orientation: “Head towards the water”
Description of a turn: “Turn just past the Big Bazaar”
Confirmation of the right path: “You’ll see a petrol station on the right”
Error correction: “If you get to the roundabout, you’ve gone too far”
team reworked turn-by-turn street directions to include navigational landmarks to help orient people, signal turns, confirm direction, and error correct.
