Simple.org Case Study / Story #4
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| Unravelling the true scale of a project is often best accomplished by asking "why?" Every paid consultant has gone through the "Five Whys" exercise. The exercise is easy: ask "why?" of the problem at hand, then ask "why?" of the answer you uncover. Repeat five times. This exercise often makes inexperienced consultants come across like curious, but incredibly annoying, three-year-olds. When consulting with an organization like _Resolve,_ the exercise wasn't actually necessary. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say was not obviously necessary. | ||
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| The first meeting at the nilenso office was with Daniel Burka, Director of Product and Design at _Resolve._ The most common appraisal Daniel had among nilenso staff who hadn't met him yet was "the guy who designed the Firefox logo." For those who had started careers early enough to witness the early days of the Firefox web browser, this was no specious laurel. Firefox represented far more than the buzzwords we associate with it today: Open Source, Free Software, a World Wide Web based on Open Standards. Back in 2003, Firefox represented the democratization of the web in a David v. Goliath fight against Microsoft's stagnant and under-performing Internet Explorer, universally hated by software developers the world over. Firefox sat in the intersection of two communities, two ideas. On the left was _Free Software._ On the right was _Design_ with a Capital D. Good Design meant that a product like Firefox had to be approached with Design Thinking. It had to have a brand. It had to be fun. It had to be so much better than everything else you would be a fool not to use it. Firefox was all these things. It was also a Javascript debugger, a CSS reverse-engineering tool, and the doorway millions of developers stepped through to create the web and the internet we all rely on today. The significance of such a tool, and such a brand, is not to be understated. So, come. Meet Daniel. The guy who designed the Firefox logo. |
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The introduction to Daniel here is definitely useful and valuable, but maybe the convergence of the significance of his work and our alignment with it is far too much, especially since we don't talk about Tim in particular later at any point. Shall we cut the Firefox background out of this?
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Yeah, sorry... this was mostly based on my own memory of the project kicking off. I don't remember the early conversations with (or about) Tim and all I remember of Daniel is honestly the Firefox logo stuff. I actually really like this passage, since Firefox and Simple both share some pretty commendable ideals in the intersection of design, branding, and open source licensing. These are uncommon qualities and I'd love to maintain a highlight on them somehow. This passage wasn't really about Daniel, per se. Maybe we could water down the focus on him as a character or at least remove this part entirely:
So, come. Meet Daniel. The guy who designed the Firefox logo.
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| The lessons in the other facilities were similar. The nurses were polite but cautious of Simple's promises. They were unflagging as a constant stream of patients poured through the clinic. And they remained full of surprises. | ||
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| "An robh thu ann an Alba? Tha e brèagha." ("Have you been to Scotland? It's beautiful.") one nurse asked with a calm smile as Srihari and Govind quizzed her about her time in Scotland, where she took her nursing degree. |
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Wait the nurse actually spoke in Gaelic? I had no idea.
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"Based on a true story." 😉
I'm happy to take this out if it's too far from the truth. I just thought it was cute.
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| The hypertension patients needed friends. Someone to coax them back into the clinic. "This is important, remember? We want you to come here so you stay healthy." There were automated text message reminders. In India, this is already extremely common so there was little surprise to patients. An Indian broadband company will text you to remind you to pay your bill. An Indian bank will drop you an SMS whenever there's a transaction on your account. This was hardly any different. Even more convincing than an SMS was a phone call from a real human being. This left the nilenso team to come up with a phone masking technique, similar to those used in taxi-hailing apps like Uber. If your cab driver doesn't want you to know her personal phone number, your nurse _definitely_ doesn't want you knowing hers. It doesn't take much imagination to see how a nurse's number out in the wild quickly transforms them into a 24/7 personal healthcare service. | ||
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| Akshay Gupta, who had recently joined his nilenso colleagues on the Simple team at this stage, describes the phone masking system: "It's a bit fun, really. Because the entire system has to assume 'offline-first' in every scenario, phone masks can't rely on anything digital. The way we got around that was to provide the nurse with a way to call the patient's number through a central number. The patient's number is actually encoded in that initial phone call using DTMF codes and that call is then routed accordingly to the patient from a number which is not the nurse's." This old-school hack was somewhat reminiscent of the phone phreaking of the 1970s, a technique that perhaps would have amused the original phone hackers like John "Captain Crunch" Draper. [^john-draper] |
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Haha, so it is clever and everything, but it might be valuable to caveat that this system only has a 65% success rate because of bad infstracture and telecom networks are unreliable and the potentially longer-term solution to this problem is to have a call center.
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🤷♀️ We can definitely do that, but remember it's not a white paper. I've elided a lot of details across the entire story due to either my own ignorance or actively disregarding them because they don't flow. Of course, if at any point the story is painting nilenso in a light which is actively dishonest, we should make sure we address that. It's your call whether this is one of those cases.
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| "My Mom used to work as a doctor in one of these remote village dispensaries when I was a kid," said Akshay. "The clinic was sort of forked off from a hospital where she'd worked and she went along to join the clinic. I remember visiting that clinic. It was very much like these dispensaries. After the day's dispensary work, she would teach English to the local kids for an hour before coming home to the city." He paused. "Yeah. It was just like this." | ||
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| Every day, the team's field visit to the clinic would begin at 4:30 AM. Wake up, drink tea, get ready, leave by 6:00 AM, arrive by 7:00 AM. One such day, despite a forecast for clear skies, it rained. On the drive to the clinic Akshay looked out the window at Punjab's fields stretching to the horizon, sparkling emerald and jade under fresh rain, smiling back at him. The clinic was silent. Patients don't come during a monsoon rain. Shortly after the team arrived, there was a small ruckus when a snake slithered into the quiet clinic and the staff struggled to get rid of it. Once the clinic was free of snakes, Deepa, Akshay, the designers, the nurses, the doctors --- everyone sat together having tea and biscuits, enjoying the company of the others for a few tranquil hours until the skies cleared at 10:00 AM and the day's first patients began to trickle in. In contrast to the clinic's normal, non-stop workday this was a rare opportunity for everyone to share their uncluttered humanity. |
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Oh, sorry. Deepa had mentioned that she had sat down for tea and Parle-G with the nurses once and I naturally assumed this was the same time. Who was all there with you for this event? (You can poke me on Slack for this, if you'd rather.)
Only four months in the making! :P