By Chin Wun Yunn, Senior Lecturer & Consultant, Digital Innovation & Design Practice, NUS-ISS
I recently relocated back to Singapore after spending 4 years abroad and instantly noticed some changes, albeit “small” ones. This may sound like an exaggeration but the technological omnipresence seems like an elaborate welcome even for this visitor returning home. From the iChangi app that was intensely promoted the moment I touched down to the extensive variety of digital payment apps that propagated the duty-free shops. For a moment I wondered if I had just landed in “Battlestar Galactica”. Is this a bid to win the smartest nation award? Hey, relax lah! My data roam is not even switched on yet.
Just do a google search and you can easily find at least 42 mobile payment players who have been active since December (Fintechnews Singapore, 2018). Yes! 42 is indeed an astounding figure for a small country like ours. While it may be good to have options that suit different needs and purposes, in reality, are we all not struggling to find the right payment app to use every time? There are various payment apps for online purchases, another set for the highest rebates and savings for offline purchases and another, for money transfers. By the way, before you get more confused, the latter is not really a mobile payment app but what we term as e-wallets. Yes, there is actually a difference between the two. Are you already lost in this whirlpool of endless payment apps?
I remember reading about an app that was created after months of user research and development, for the elderly but it was not utilised. What went wrong? Somehow, somewhere during the process, the objective of the app might have deviated or the intended user’s needs were just not addressed. In this case, a digital solution obviously did not work for the intended users. Similarly, there are apps that were created for citizens to report or respond to emergencies when in actuality, we would instinctively dial 999 instead?
How many times do we find ourselves complicating a simple problem? If we are not asking the right questions right from the start, we might just find ourselves creating more and more apps that we do not need and that do not work.
Imagine how much easier our lives would be if we started by asking the right questions! One of the greatest thinkers, Albert Einstein said, ‘If I had an hour to solve a problem and my life depended on the solution, I would spend the first 55 minutes determining the proper question to ask, for once I know the proper question, I could solve the problem in less than five minutes’. Our solutions can only be as good as the questions that lead to them.
Unfortunately, asking good questions or framing the right ones are not always as straightforward as it seems. It takes a lot of practice and the right techniques before we can get to the crux of the problem.
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