Project Type
Masters Thesis
Industry
Healthcare
Duration
6 months
Role
End-to-end qualitative research and design (n=40+, planning, recruiting, execution, synthesis, reporting, presentation)
Skills in Action
Ethnography, Observation, Interviewing, Applied Systems Thinking, Prototyping, Creative research methods
Output
Insights, Design Principles, Digital Product
Designing for agency in India's family-influenced pregnancies
Overview
Starting from the brief "How might we use technology to improve gender equity?", I focused on a context where gender dynamics are intimate, daily, and high-stakes: first-time pregnancy in middle-income Indian families. Through 21 days of ethnographic fieldwork across Chennai and Indore (50+ interviews, 14 home visits, day-long observations with 3 OB-GYNs), I mapped the ecosystem surrounding pregnant women: husbands, mothers-in-law, doctors, friends, and extended family. What emerged was a complex adaptive challenge—socio-cultural expectations, economic pressures, and competing needs pulling at once. No one was failing her, but the pregnant woman ended up doing invisible work to receive care that should flow toward her at this time. The key insight: the husband has the most leverage in this system. The research reframed the design challenge from improving her agency directly to helping husbands become confident, effective partners in ways that meet their needs and strengthen their partners' agency.
Impact
Prototype tested at Jupiter Hospital, Indore, and is now in its second phase of development.
Finalist, Mittal Institute's 2024 Seed for Change Competition ($30,000 Grant). This is a competition with participants across all schools at Harvard, rewarding "bold ideas with potential for widespread impact in India".
Presented to a jury of partners from IDEO, Frog, and MIT D-Lab as part of the Master's in Design Engineering program at Harvard.
How might we increase a first-time pregnant woman's agency in family-influenced households in India?
Key Tension: In India, pregnancy is communal. Women still feel alone.
When a woman becomes pregnant, the world around her reorganizes. Extended family moves closer. Mothers-in-law provides advice. Husbands start tracking finances. Friends share what worked for them. Yet, women describe feeling lonely. There is a gap between care that's given, care that's needed, and who does the work to bridge that gap.
I focused on middle-income families, often overlooked in maternal health research. These households have resources to involve extended family, education to form opinions, and proximity to maintain daily oversight.
Customers choose accountability, not channels
Customers don't trust policies—they trust people. Friends, family, and agents drive decisions more than websites or aggregators. Even digitally-savvy customers who research online seek human validation before committing.
Recommendation: The 170,000+ village footprint is MIBL's trust infrastructure. Digital strategy has to work with it, not around it.
Visibility beats outcome
Even if customers aren't able to receive the full claim amount at the end, customers still cite an overall positive experience where they were kept informed.
Recommendation: Investing in reduced ambiguity, increased transparency, and clarity for customers can have a higher impact on attrition rates and brand image as compared to process optimization.
Claims shape brand perception more than purchase
Purchase journeys are relatively smooth across channels. Claims is where experiences diverge, and where lasting impressions form. Recurring pain points include: no visibility into processing status, repeated documentation requests, unexplained delays, and hidden fees.
Recommendation: A digitally-enabled claims tracking experience could be a significant differentiator, especially for their semi-urban/rural base, where physical office visits are burdensome.
Aggregators help discovery but hurt conversion
PolicyBazaar, a direct but much larger competitor to MIBL's PayBima, works for initial comparison. But aggressive callbacks, pushy tactics, and price discrepancies erode trust at decision time.
Recommendation: There's space for an alternative that offers aggregator-level transparency with agent-level accountability.
Two key stakeholders that shape CX
Hospital administrators
Network quality is about the administrative competence of partner hospitals and not just geographic coverage. In cashless claims, hospital admin teams initiate the process, gather documents, and coordinate with the insurer. A smooth hospital experience created peace of mind, even when payouts were reduced. A poor one created stress regardless of policy quality.
Recommendation: MIBL could differentiate by curating hospital partnerships based on claims-handling quality in addition to geographic coverage.
Agents and PoSPs
Agents are the single point of contact for trust, handholding, and claims support. Supported agents deliver better service. Unsupported ones create friction or charge hidden fees.
Recommendation: Investing in agent tools and training has downstream effects on customer satisfaction, especially for MIBL's village network.
We then identified key customer Jobs-To-Be-Done across verticals and mapped them to different phases of the journey, including learning, evaluation, purchase, renewal, and claims.
Approach
We had the project lead on MIBL's side join a bulk of the 70+ interviews across channels, creating an internal advocate who heard customer frustrations firsthand rather than filtered through a report. We debriefed after every few sessions, pursuing emerging threads in real-time rather than waiting for synthesis at the end. We started each interview with word associations to surface participants' emotional landscape quickly, then followed their unique story, pushed for "show me" moments, and covered the necessary details to map the journey. We shared our findings with senior executive leadership and facilitated a workshop to help them develop a roadmap based on our recommendations.
Learning
I mapped journeys for three verticals, three phases with five sub-phases, and four channels—while coordinating with three other researchers, ops, clients, and ramping fast on insurance fundamentals, regulatory context, and MIBL's product ecosystem.
Midway through, we discovered some participants were fabricating their insurance purchase and experiences. Once identified, I worked with our ops team to strengthen screening protocols, including cross-checking participant details myself against India's national vehicle registry database to verify actual policy ownership. We also renegotiated the project timeline with our client, given slower recruitment, prioritizing research quality over speed. Getting into the details of recruitment gave me a new appreciation for how difficult it is to source the right participants for a study this large and specific. I understood that research quality starts with ops rigor, well before interviews and synthesis.
All in all, this project sharpened my ability to toggle between detail and big picture, especially the discipline to capture detailed journeys across 40+ interviews, and the judgment to elevate only what answers "so what does this mean for the business."
