India is a large country and it requires a unique approach when planning for UX Research. With a population of nearly 1.3 billion, it is the second-most populous country and seventh-largest country by land area.
Generally, we assume that people speak nearly the same language across a country. Or maybe some countries speak two or three.
India has 23 recognised official languages. Moreover, dialect keeps changing after a few kilometres. If you wish to gather insight from across the geography, then you would encounter many different languages and you need to be prepared for it.
We recently did exploratory research in India for a client that required us to talk to people from the north, south, east and west part of the country. If you are thinking of doing the same, it is worth considering the language capabilities required in the UX research team.
Most teams will have English and Hindi language capabilities and that will cover most of the participants. Some of our recent participants only spoke Telugu. You might encounter participants who only speak Tamil, Kannada, Marathi or Bengali.
While, recruiting participants who speak these languages is not difficult, finding good UX capability can be. We have a wide language coverage across our team but working out the planning of who is available to take interviews with different participants at what time based on the language preferences is complicated.
