By 2035, Gen Z will be Indonesia’s economic engine. This project use foresights to get a glimplse at their possible financial futures.

Building on our prior research for WWB on Youth Financial Literacy funded by Gates Foundation, enriched by literature studies, field observations, and discussions with 9 cross-disciplinary experts, we are scanning the global, national, sectoral, and local trends that will drive their financial behaviors and shape their future landscape.

In Indonesia, where there is a shortage of healthcare professionals, community health workers, or cadres, play a vital role as to support delivery of Primary Healthcare Services in Indonesia. This project aims to empower cadres with digital decision support tools to help them perform their jobs better in serving the community.

We started by listening deeply through interviews, observations, and co-creation sessions with cadres, healthcare professionals, and key stakeholders — from local leaders to the Ministry of Health. These insights shaped our design of a digital decision support tool, in the form of a mobile app for the cadres, and monitoring dashboard for local leaders and healthcare professionals. The tools were then implemented in Keerom, Papua and Surabaya, East Java. We built support systems (training sessions, video tutorials, and WA) to help cadres feel confident and capable in using the tool. And to understand the real impact, we used the ‘Most Significant Change’ framework and mapped stories from cadres, communities, and supervisors with Theory of Change.

We conducted in-depth interviews with 19 primary stakeholders involved in MSE support programs, including representatives from government institutions, NGOs, universities, digital selling platforms, and support organizations. These conversations were complemented by additional discussions with 9 other informants and informal inputs from ecosystem players who supported recruitment and context-building.

Although our research team was based in Jakarta, we engaged with stakeholders operating across various regions, including Jakarta, West Java (e.g., Bandung, Bogor), Central Java, East Java (e.g., Malang), Yogyakarta, Bali, South Sulawesi (e.g., Makassar), and East Nusa Tenggara (NTT) and other places. Interviews were conducted through a mix of online and offline sessions, depending on respondent availability and location.

To understand what kind of mechanisms have better potentials to increase CASA, we realized that gauging concept preferences is not enough to analyse how the program would change customers’ behaviour related to CASA. Therefore, we took a performance testing method as part of the FGD with customers, to simulate how they will experience the program in their everyday context.

The mechanism concepts were developed based on our desk research of the competitive landscape and understanding internal visions of each department involved in the program through stakeholders interviews. During the field research we also interviewed multiple layers of internal employees and current program participants to get a holistic point of view. We worked closely with the working team who has been running the program for years, to ensure we mapped all the gaps and opportunities that had not yet been explored.

The client wants to increase their market share in the C2C courier service, aligned with the rising trend of e-commerce and SMEs. They see Customer Experience (CX) as a key component in this. We were engaged to help them to understand the customers’ needs and expectations towards the service, identify gaps and problems both from the customer-facing and internally within the organization, identify opportunity areas for improvements and innovations, and prototype the prioritized idea in the field.

Through a comprehensive service immersion and mapping out the gaps and opportunity areas, we developed a roadmap for CX initiatives that encompass both customer-facing as well as internal organizational improvements. As a quick-win strategy, we redefined the “Pickup delivery service” experience, through immersive prototyping and testing. Additionally, the newly formed team who shadowed our team during the process has developed the skills and confidence to integrate human-centered design mindsets and facilitate collaboration with cross-functional teams.

To identify gaps and opportunity areas along the end-to-end customer journey, for both frontstage and backstage interactions within a short timeline, we involved different internal stakeholders/actors in collaborative workshops. This initial service blueprint was then further enriched with immersions, observations, and interviews with customers and internal employees. From the insights and systems mapping, we identified several leverage points for quick wins and a roadmap for future CX initiatives. We involved key actors in prototyping the quick win service ideas in the field, which allowed us to be grounded in the operational constraints. Throughout the project, key members of the newly formed CX team were actively involved, to empower them to continue the process even after the completion of our team’s engagement.

The research is conducted in 3 provinces: North Sumatra, East Java and South Sulawesi, as representative of the west, central and east region of Indonesia to best represent the geographical context. This locations are selected as they have barriers in limited banking infrastructure, low economy and financial literacy but have good internet penetration and digital availability as the basic requirements of the adoption. 

The thick research uses an ethnographic approach to discover and document the onboarding journey of different segments in different services (agri-tech, mobile & digital banking, digital wallet, digital lending, QRIS, and government aid – PKH & Prakerja).

ECOSYSTEM & STAKEHOLDER LEVEL

As support systems and infrastructure are crucial in digital financial services adoption, we started by understanding the context and mapping the ecosystem. This includes observing the infrastructure in the system, their roles, the communication used, etc. From our initial landscape mapping, we identified several key stakeholders and gathered data through transect walk, shadowing, and in-depth interviews with key government and service providers stakeholders.

PRODUCT AND PERSONAL LEVEL

Understanding the products / services used and deep dive into the target group context, literacy and behaviors towards DFS as well as the detailed onboarding process. In this phase, we also dug deeper into findings from the ecosystem mapping and stakeholder & provider discovery. The data was collected from various methods such as intercepts, Focus Group Discussions, shadowing, fly on the wall to In-depth interviews.

To make sure we get the most from the initiative, the project project was broken up into 2 phases. The first one is desk research followed up with remote interviews with the content creators. This is to get an initial understanding and know which topics we should dig deeper into in the second phase with the ethnographic approach, visiting and observing directly in the content creator environment.

To be able to capture the richness and complexity of the topic being covered, we used a filmmaking approach when the content creators explained and shared their practices. Film clips are aimed to get the client a deep understanding of the content creators’ environment, creation process, and the way they interact with their audiences.

Building a cohesive brand experience as omni-channel retail from a traditional way is a complex and critical journey nowadays. One of the big retail companies in beauty and cosmetics approached Somia, to design the future Customer Experience (CX) vision that seamlessly integrates the client’s overall ecosystem.

The main objective was to design the future customer experience (CX) vision that seamlessly integrates the client’s overall ecosystem. Our key initial challenges were to find out what motivates customers, their current relationship with the brand, and their shopping habits beyond their needs. We have also immersed ourselves in investigating the stakeholders, front liners, and high-level management in the form of service safari and workshops to align the vision together.

We engaged with a new startup to enter the e-commerce market targeting rural areas in Indonesia. Since it was still at the beginning of the development, our biggest challenge was defining the target customers and product strategy to have the right angle for the rural market.

We need to understand our users better to define the go-to-market strategy. The explorations that have been done aren’t targeting only the store owners but also other stakeholders, like suppliers, logistics, and also the BUMDes (village apparatus). Based on those explorations we have gained a deeper understanding of the whole ecosystem. Our works aren’t limited to the initial discovery only. We also did service evaluation by visiting areas in Central Java with different types of local merchants. This evaluation helps us to uncover a holistic service journey that can be improved and implemented into e-commerce product transformation.

Targeting the rural market would be challenging, especially if the products heavily rely on digital. Here are some of the insights that we’ve captured from our research:

• Physical touchpoints and offline relationships are essential to bridge the interaction. The existing user journey has been developed for a long time and is primarily offline. Hence, the product can’t apply fully digital experience and touchpoints instantly.

• Trust is built over time. Trust is earned. Familiar faces are needed, and past bad experiences set their trust. In this service journey, reliable agents, stock availability, and straightforward legal entities greatly influence customer trust.

• The product should build simple and practical over users’ existing habits. Their day has always been packed with warung/ shop routines, and they are served by sales which come directly to the shops. They don’t have time or motivation to learn new things that add more complexities to their current habits.

Kohler wanted to explore opportunity areas to cater Muslim specific needs in bathspace. We started the exploratory journey in 2017 with a series of user research, ethnographic research, observations, and interview with experts. We derived key opportunity areas for innovation and we then worked closely with the client to do iterative user testing with the developed concepts and working prototypes. The project won several international awards and has been developed and launched to the public in 2022.

As the Muslim market is growing, Kohler, one of the largest international sanitaryware companies, wanted to develop new innovative sanitary wares for Muslims. Throughout the 3 years project, we worked closely with Kohler to discover new opportunities for innovations, develop concepts and then test and iterate the design of the concept: