S06E05: Build Tools with Inclusivity in Mind with Shamsu Bhaidani of Bello

Speaker A: Everybody's got some level of effort that they're putting in to be inclusive, to have accessibility built in.

Speaker B: You're listening to trip, the Research Inclusion Project. We're your hosts, Katrina Noel and Kristin Spraggins.

Speaker C: Welcome back TRIP listeners. We're so excited to welcome the very gracious Shamsu Baidani. He is not only a great advocate in the space for research, but he's here to talk to us about his new product, Bello. Before we get into all that Shamsu, if you could just start off and tell our listeners a little bit about yourself.

Speaker A: For sure. Uh, my name is Shamsu Baidani, I am uh, up in Calgary, Canada. I have been in the market research software platform space for, oh God, let's say 20 odd years now and kind of been uh, just talking to researchers, building software, kind of enjoying talking to some really, really smart people which makes my life easier to come up with these products and had some, some, some success. About three years ago I sold my last company called Hatch Tank and then took some time off with my kids and I just couldn't sit still and I really had a lot more to offer. So we started working on a new product called Bello, uh, earlier this year and we are almost at that point we're ready to launch but it's been quite a bit of learning and it's been a already.

Speaker B: That's amazing. And as regular TRIP listers know, I have been angling to get a platform on the show for I guess six years. So thank you, thank you for being an inclusive minded developer and platform provider. We are just thrilled to have a conversation through that lens as well. But we are definitely going to uh, put the link to Bello in the show notes so that everybody can get a sense of that platform as well and maybe hit you up for a demo or other good stuff. But how we kind of plunge into this usually is talking about your inclusive insight story. So I know Kristen and I have heard a number of different ways in which Bello and probably originally hatchtank made it a priority to make sure everyone could participate in research. I would love to start there about kind of how that came up for you, if it was intentional or accidental or. Yeah. How do you decided to make that a part of the product and the product development?

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely. We basically started down the path with Hatch Tank where I wanted to make the platform really, really eas and this was about 2016 ish. The idea was to make sure that it's easy to read, easy to follow, easy to Navigate really easy to use on whatever device that was available. So it didn't have to be a computer only thing. But the idea was to kind of make this available and make this really easy for people to access. Not just from a usability perspective, but also sort of requiring low bandwidth requirements where you don't need to have a high speed connection all the time, you could have a reasonable connection would work. It didn't need to have a high end computer or anything like that either. And we, we kind of took that mindset from Hatch Tank and brought it into Bello. My first sort of thought was, all right, so we're going to make this available again for everybody we can get our hands on in terms of whoever would be the users of this and make life easier. But like we started thinking a little bit different from the perspective of, uh, not just let's make this easy to use low bandwidth, multiple screens, et cetera, but also what about those people that difficulties, hearing difficulties seeing people who are not the most tech savvy either. How do you make this instantly familiar easy? How do you give people flexibility in terms of changing fonts? Because maybe they can't see it very well because the font's too small, let's make it bigger, let's give different sizes and stuff like that. So there are many standards out there and we wanted to make sure that we kind of looked at that and tried to adhere to some of those standards at a global level. So companies who would be able to sponsor the research, be able to use the platform, but they can then bring in that other community of people that they don't necessarily get all the time to participate in their research either.

Speaker C: Shamsu, I have to, I have to tell you, I love the fact that there's so many points of inclusivity that you've touched as somebody who was a very religious user of Hatch Tank and then soon to be Bellow once, once everything gets rolling here. Katrina and I started this podcast for representation and the ability to reach people. And I know that's a big advocate that you guys have on your team is being able to reach people like you mentioned, that have low bandwidth and maybe not have the digital literacy that they need to in order to. Your product may not have the accessibility piece. So there's so many different facets, but I think one area I would love to hear a little bit more about is some of the different testing that you're doing at Bello in order to reach some of those broader audiences across the geographic landscape.

Speaker A: Yeah, no, absolutely. And I think first. First I want to point out that we weren't even. I wasn't even looking at it as, uh, over being inclusive. I was just looking at it as, oh, we need to have these features so we can get everybody in there. I just wasn't using Word, but I guess when you put two in together, that's basically what's ended up happening. In terms of the testing, yeah, we've been doing a lot of testing over the last little while. We're slowly taking on clients. I want to be super happy with the product if I can open it out to the world kind of thing, Right. And we've got a bunch of beta users as well. And we've learned a few things, right? So we've learned that first foray right into it was, oh, yeah, everybody's got Zoom and everybody can use it, and so on and so forth. With the previous product, it was all asynchronous research, so there's nothing live. It was communities, and the tech was lower lift, if you will, because people have an amount of time to complete it, and if they can't do it in one spot, they can go somewhere else. With Bello, we've gone down the path of creating live meetings, uh, specifically with the market research lens on it. And that in itself is quite a bit more unforgiving because if you get a meeting scheduled for 10am, well, it needs to happen at 10am it can't be pushed off till 10:30 or schedule for another day or do it half an hour later or an hour later. So when we started off, we kind of just kind of said, all right, you know, everybody's got Zoom and everybody, everybody can watch whatever or be part of whatever meetings. But we quickly realized that that's not necessarily the case as a researcher or as a project owner. You've got a researcher on hook, you've got recruiters who have recruited specific people for specific times, and if the meeting doesn't happen when it's supposed to happen, uh, well, all that is a waste, basically, right, because your participants are not coming back, or if they come back, you got to pay them extra, all that kind of stuff. So we had to make sure that things work really well. So in doing that, we found that sometimes there were people who just didn't have the best connections, they didn't have the best hardware. These are video connections. So you do need, uh, a good quality connection. You do need some newer hardware on their end to get the best value out of it. So first time around, it was terrible. Like we learned lessons very quickly that, you know, it just doesn't work out of the box. So in doing so, we kind of started playing with how do we kind of accommodate for different speeds, different settings. So things like noise cancellation or echo reduction in the product. But that takes CPU power, right? So, uh, sometimes what was happening is we said, okay, noise cancellation is a great thing because we want the most clear without uninterrupted sound out there, right? So let's turn it on by default. But then we realized that in some instances it was creating static, it was creating choppiness in the audio. So we tested it out and sure enough, that's where what was happening. So let's put a toggle on there to turn it on and off and let's leave it off and turn it on only if necessary. So that way it's less disruptive. Other scenarios would be with the video, right? Like, um, generally what's happening is when you're doing a video conversation, um, in terms of data usage, your video is taking a lot more data than your audio is. But in trying to keep the video at high end, you're sacrificing audio and then the audio becomes choppy. So we introduced adaptive bandwidth scaling. So the idea would be, is that it would see what a person's um, Internet connection would look like and then feed out video only at that level. So that doesn't sacrifice the audio. So we were getting more clear audio conversations, things were getting recorded and you could see based on a person's connection, you can see the video a little bit more fuzzy or not, but you can hear them clearly. And I feel at the end of the day when you're doing analysis, all the stuff gets transcribed. And yes, the video is great to create sizzle reels and highlight reels and stuff like that. But, but your main analysis comes from the audio side of things. So that needs to be flawless. Right? So we kind of looked at those kinds of things, just making sure that when we were kind of bringing the participants into the meeting before we did that there was some level of tech check happening. So we kind of did a self tech check and we went through multiple iterations of that. Everything from just, hey, is your mic working? Okay, can you see this? Uh, can you see yourself in the screen? Press a button. Now play some sound for you. So I have speakers working. We started with that and then we kind of went into, well, great, all that is working. Now record a 30 second video for us just to make sure that we can see what that looks like, and then, you know, we can pick out whether, uh, this participant is going to have an issue or not. Right. And then we can adjust before the meeting. And then that happens typically a day before, but then 15 minutes before the meeting as well is when kind of the lobby of the meeting opens up. And we do a manual tech check as well. Just make sure someone on our team is on there. They come in, we have a quick conversation with them saying, okay, this looks good. That looks not so good. Your lighting's not that great. Can you sit in a different area maybe, et cetera, et cetera. Right. Tilt and pan your screen or your camera down so I can see your face properly, etc. And then get them ready and then bring them in. So we want to make sure that service is a big aspect of what we do. With Hatch Tank it was. And that was something that we got a ton of feedback on and something I'm super proud of from the past as well. And that's something that we want to carry forward because we want to make sure that the participants to me are the bread and butter of a project. Like without the participants, nothing happens. If I have to spend time to tech check with the moderator, that's not a big deal because I have more access to that person. Right, but. And I have access before between meetings and all that kind of stuff. But I only have one shot with a participant and I want to make sure that they are taken care of. So that is sort of how we started going down all of this. But then we also started talking about, okay, what if someone has, uh, colorblindness? So things like that, you know, that's been the journey so far.

Speaker B: I mean, I just love that it's your idea of we want to include everyone. That, that wasn't necessarily, let's be inclusive. That's just smart, right? I mean there's some great work done by the Accessible Insights Consortium that has a lot of, um, language around, you know, 25% of the population associates with some sort of disability. That's a lot of people. You don't ever want to exclude 25% of people from anything. Right? So I love that it's like product feature based innov and techniques and services to make sure everyone's included. By the way, that makes us an inclusive platform. I just, I love that way into it. I actually also really appreciate the reminder to not assume from a tech perspective because I think a lot of us do. I think you're right. We think, oh, we've all got this now. This Is just like how we spend our days, but not everybody does lives that life.

Speaker C: Right.

Speaker B: Sometimes I'm jealous of that. But not everybody spends their day on webcam calls all day. And also connections change, computers change, change, updates haven't happened. You may be in a bad space on Tuesday when you weren't during your tech check on Monday. So that's a really good reminder for all of us to just, just not assume that we're all perfectly connected at all times. I'm wondering if there's anything else like that that you've discovered in your work, especially working with other researchers, because they're coming to you, right? You're kind of a part of their project, but have their own. Have there been any kind of methods or practices or techniques or anything that you've noticed the research teams using your platforms are doing to kind of help make sure everyone's included?

Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, what I do find from at least the group of researchers that I've worked with, uh, especially on the live side of things recently, is that they all have some really good sets of instructions. Right. Like, so it could be an email that goes out to the people beforehand, or it could be, you know, the first couple minutes of the meeting giving them the lay of the land on what needs to be done and so on. I've seen a couple researchers really spell it out like this button is for this. That buttons for that make sure and very specific to platform that they use. Whether it's Bello or something else, they kind of become that first line of technical help. So that way people are not making mistakes during the meetings, explaining to people, being there for them, making the effort to become an expert in the platform that they're using. So that way they don't have to rely on that help person sitting in the background because that introduces another voice into the meeting. And then the observers are looking and it's not as seamless as it could be. So, uh, I see a lot of researchers kind of work from that perspective and definitely making the effort to be there for the participants so that they can help them through the process and make life really easy.

Speaker C: I love the reminder of the participants are the bread and butter of the research. Like people that we kind of forget that. There's been so many models that I've been introduced to in software products that really advocate for the back end of the research that supports the researcher's perspective. But always working with you has always had that foundational piece of participant engagement. And I think that's such a helpful reminder as well, I'm just wondering if there's been for you any sort of like, aha moment or a story or like a shift in your perspective of when you've seen that come to life in so much more of a meaningful way. And it doesn't even have to necessarily just be from Bellow, but just in your time in this field, because it is a unique position that you've been able to take, kind of leading up all these different technology endeavors for the researchers.

Speaker A: That's a good question. It's the other way around that. What I recently learned was that there was a project, things didn't go well. There was some technology issues, there was some participant issues, there was some recruitment issues. It was a mixed bag of stuff. It was a set of like four focus groups, and the first couple went really well, and the next two didn't go as well. As good client said, let's just reschedule these things to later. And you had, uh, five to six people in each of those two groups. It was easy to say at that moment, let's just reschedule this. One of the things that we did, if you can't join the meeting because your audio or if you're in the meeting and your audio is really choppy for whatever reason, and it's technology and people expect everything to work flawlessly. But I hate to say it, but it's technology and there's always going to be something or the other. And it's not an excuse, it's just fact. How do you get around that? We started looking at alternate options. So one of the features that we added on Bellow is, uh, the ability to dial out using a phone. The researcher or the moderator or the host of the meeting could simply press a button and pop something up on their screen. As soon as they hit the button in three seconds, it calls them and they're in the meeting. And then their phone becomes their sort of audio device. So, um, they can listen in and talk right from their phone, but they're on the screen. But things like that we learned based on this despair of meeting going, not the best case scenario. And we're like, okay, what can we do to get around this? It took a little bit of the outside of the box thinking to make it work. But those are kind of like the alternate plans and the contingencies and stuff like that that we've come up with.

Speaker B: And I'm curious about that. You know, people who are having conversations like these see the value in making sure everything is done human and technologically Possible to include as many voices in research. Right. Have you or have you had any conversations with the researchers booking the platforms, had conversations about if and how this is a competitive advantage? Meaning we talk a lot about making sure that we, as researchers, push for funding, push for approval of not just projects, but ways of. Of doing projects that encourage inclusivity. It seems like you have a lot of very specific features and benefits of the products that allow for that. I'm just wondering if you or your clients have used that or if, you know, that they have, um, to push something through or to, you know, choose your platform or to make the project, you know, a little bit more inclusive than the last one. Have you had any conversations along those lines?

Speaker A: Um, recently? A lot of conversations, actually. There are up in Canada, we've got the big five banks. One of the banks is pushing a lot. The word that they use is accessibility. Accessibility is a big deal. And I've spoken to a couple really big research houses out of Toronto who work with one of these banks. And it's not just this one bank, right. It's a lot of different organizations, but these guys are spearheading some major efforts. And the message I got is that there is absolutely no platform out there that does this. What we have right now is the unique benefit of creating something new at the moment compared to some of the other players out there, because, you know, they've been there, the incumbents, they've been in this space for a while. For them to go back and make major changes, and it will require major changes on their platform to do this, uh, for them to do that. It is a lot of time and effort and money, obviously, and in our case, it is still a lot of time and effort and money, but we've got the luxury of being able to sort of incorporate that into what we're building right off the bat. So what that does is allows us to have that available to these companies and clients. And I'm just giving you a Canadian example, like, I'm sure. I mean, the US market is, uh, I don't know, gazillion times bigger. You know, you look at Europe and you look at Australia, you look at, you know, out Far east, the Asia Pacific region, everybody's got some level of effort that they're putting in to be inclusive, to have accessibility built in. So hopefully we'll answer the call for them as well. But right now we are learning based on what our local market is telling us, which I think applies across the globe as well.

Speaker C: Kind of piggybacking on that thought, building a model where pricing is an accessible based solution for you. I know that that has been something you've always advocated. You've seen what other products are out on the market and the price points and the subscription based model that doesn't allow for ad hoc buy in and that sort of thing. And I know that you've been quite bullish about that of like having an approachable base price point. Do you, are you guys thinking about that as far as still um, pursuing that for Bellow as well?

Speaker A: So here's the thing Bello is this opportunity for me personally to do something that I really love and enjoy. I've been doing this for the last 20 years. I'm not tired of it yet. And this is sort of just, just something that I want to do good with this product. Right. And with the service. You know, obviously you're in business to make money. I think it's how we charge, how we do things. So if I'm pricing this out, number one is transparency. We're going to be very transparent with our pricing. The numbers are going to be on the website and it's going to be very, very straightforward pricing. And we want to make it affordable, we want to make it very easy to understand. So the way we're kind of approaching it is based on credits. If you got a project where you, you need to do let's say 15 interviews in a project, right. Like you, you need 15 credits then, right? So you can buy credits that are specific to your project only. So that is a project based pricing. But if you decide that, okay, you know, I have a team of five and we're going to do X number of projects over the next 12 months. Let's go buy 200 credits, let's go buy 500 credits. Obviously there's going to be discounts based on that. For the clients that I've been working over the years with, a lot of them don't like committing to um, uh, subscriptions and whatnot simply because this is a uh, feast or famine sort of business and you don't know what, what things look like three months out, six months out. Uh, in a lot of cases, some people, yeah, absolutely, they've got consistent business. But for a lot of, it's like I can plan out maybe two months, three months in advance, but nothing beyond that. Right. So we want to respect that, we want to accommodate that and that's how we're going to do our pricing.

Speaker B: I think that flexibility is helpful. Thank you for being inclusive from a research partner Standpoint, this is another layer, I suppose. Um, I love it. So. So if we follow that track, right? If we follow the slightly unpredictable state of most things, including our industry at the moment, you know, I don't know how your crystal ball is looking these days, but if you had kind of ideal future state of research and tech, right? If we have this conversation 10 years from now, we're pro. What do you hope will have happened? What do you hope will be available from a platform and technology standpoint? I don't know if you're still going to be in charge of building it up. Maybe, maybe like, you know, company number three. But in general, what would you want to see as the next steps of growth or innovation in this space?

Speaker A: I personally don't. At least not for the, not for the next little bit. I don't see AI taking over researcher jobs because you guys do. And the spices you bring to the mix, AI just can't do right now. It's good and it gets better and better from an analysis perspective. But again, you've heard things like hallucinations, you've heard things like, you know, it's surface level, it doesn't dig deep and all that kind of stuff. I was at a conference, we did like a workshop about people and talking about AI and so on. And at that time there was a lot of people saying, yeah, this is just going to fluff. Uh, those same people today are either potentially out of business or on the bandwagon now, or at least have a lot more appreciation of what this thing can do and how it could be helpful. And to me, whether it's people, whether it's platforms and technology, if you don't leverage it in a good way and take advantage of it, you're the only one that's going to be on the losing end at the end of the day. So when we started going down the path of building Bellow, the conversation was, what do we want to do? Do we want to just go build an AI analysis tool that a lot of people are building? I feel that there's a lot we can do to offer and build in there and build this ecosystem where, you know, you've got live, you've got asynchronous, you've got AI analytics built right into the platform and so on. I feel that a lot of AI is going to get incorporated on the day to day, but I'm still a believer of it will never replace the humans in terms of what you guys do and what you guys bring to the table, the depth of that, the quality of that, the ability to, to pivot and ask questions on the fly, the ability to adjust and move around. Your discussion guide. Ten years from now, there's going to be a lot more AI uh, being incorporated in what we do.

Speaker C: But I love that we're, you know, we still have relevancy, Katrina. You know,

Speaker B: we have some.

Speaker C: Thank you for that optimism.

Speaker B: That's exciting. I don't know if we want to, but we'll have them, apparently.

Speaker C: That's good.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker C: So appreciate that optimism from you. You've given us so many amazing actions to take as far as being more inclusive, how to have kind of check your own understanding of technology and how to bring people into a platform and how get better representation. And some of the. You're even being open and sharing some of your failures, which I really appreciate as well, because we, those are the most that we learn from. I'm wondering if there's one action our, uh, listeners, whether to researchers or business leaders or getting that participant more involved or you know, having like a more hand to hand kind of connection. If there's one specific piece of advice you would want to, for listeners to, to take away from today's episode.

Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. Learn or be an expert in the product that you're using. It doesn't have to be Bello. It could be any of the others out there. Right. Spend some time with the technology company, understand the features of the product. How do you do, how would you share screen if you need to share some audio or some video as part of stem, how do you do that? Make sure you know all this stuff right up front and you've tried it out a couple of times. Because when the meeting's happening, whether you choose to bring in additional support or not, you are the shepherd and you're kind of leading your people in. So as a researcher, that's what I would do. As a, as a client, I would want to spend 10 or 15 minutes on the platform as well, just to understand what the back room is, what the capabilities is, what can I communicate to the, how do I communicate with the researcher, et cetera. And from a participant's perspective, I think this is where you can partner up with your recruiters and you can say, look, we would love for these people to go do a tech check right up front. So that way they kind of have an understanding of what website to go to, where the email, uh, sits so that they don't have to go look for the link all the time and make sure there's some sort of phone number available so that if there is is a phone call to make and get in touch with people, they're easily available. So there's no sort of excuse to say, oh, we couldn't get a hold of these people and so on. And so one time thing, right? If you're going to use that platform over and over again, you just keep getting better at this thing and I think that will yield a lot of success.

Speaker B: I love that. Okay, everybody. Tripp listeners, we are now shepherds of the research. So take your job responsibility seriously. Use good tech. Um, get old school phone numbers. They do work. Even if people don't like talking on the phone anymore, they still work and they're great reminder tools. Thank you so much. We really appreciate your time today. It's as Kristen said at the beginning, so lovely to have a very longtime friend and advocate of all things tech and research on the show with us. So thank you for your time. We really appreciated it.

Speaker D: The Research Inclusion Project is hosted by Kristen Spraggins and Katrina Noel and is produced in partnership with Hasty Storytelling. Hasty Storytelling is a creative agency that specializes in qualitative market research solutions, video and audio production, graphic design, animation and photography. Trip is available wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker C: Sam.