Mobile Literacy

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• The Mobile Literacy Research
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Design Principles

By Rachel Glaves, Alexa Andrejewski, Rachel Hinman and Brian Cronin
May 18th, 2008

After we developed our insights from the research we developed the Design Principles. We came up with six primary design principles:

• Honor the Culture of Relationships. Understand how people in the market are going to use the device or service to communicate or get information, by seeing what they do now.
• Design for Cultural Relevance. Support existing needs, values, networks and experiences.
• Design for Today’s World. Resources in rural India are scarce, and people manage them carefully. Systems and services familiar to western cultures simply don’t exist. Designing a solution to fit existing infrastructure and cultural experience is essential to its success.
• Design Legos, Not Model Car Kits. Giving people a flexible toolkit of parts rather than a prescribed solution to a one problem opens up opportunities for cross-cultural iteration.
• Leapfrog the PC. More than a phone, mobile devices present the opportunity to invent new ways for people to access and interact with information.
• Generate Awareness & Adoption. Creating mechanisms for facilitating awareness and adoption helps to ensure that all who can benefit from a device or service are aware of and able to use it.

You can download our research findings and design principles.

Let's dig down into these in detail.

Honor the Culture of Relationships

Build on the Cultural Practices of Relationships
Relationships are paramount and nothing is more valuable and sacred than family relationships. Create systems that honor the cultural practices of relationships in India.

Help People Navigate Social Networks Effectively
People lucky enough to have a vast social/family networks need tools to navigate their networks more effectively. Create systems that help people operate within their family networks and connect to culturally relevant networks.

Provide Access to Information
People with small social networks lose out because they’re unable to compete effectively in the marketplace. Mobile devices and services that allow people to expand and connect their social networks as well as access the information these networks provide will help the people who need it most.

Design for Cultural Relevance

Support existing needs, values, networks and experiences.

Cultivate Accurate Mental Models
Design interactions that do not rely on western conventions and metaphors. The system should rely on organization principles, communication methods and iconic representations that are relevant to local experience. Recognize the cultural norms of verbal communication and spatial memory.

Evolve a Known Technological Experience
Create a solution which builds on experience with culturally familiar objects: cars, radios, calculators, televisions and bicycles instead of computers, websites and video games. Explore direct feedback, single-button functions and mechanical clarity.

Emphasize Local Adoption Styles
Create technology and interfaces that can match how people live; India is not discreet or quiet so a solution should be vibrant and expressive of Indian society, culture, religion and way of life. It should also assume the mobile devices are shared and that conversations may involve many people speaking to many, rather than one to one conversations on a personal device.

Design for Today’s World

Resources in rural India are scarce, and people manage them carefully. Systems and services familiar to western cultures simply don’t exist. Designing a solution to fit existing infrastructure and cultural experience is essential to its success.

Maximize Minutes
For the average rural family, minutes are as dearly bought as food and fuel. Solutions must make the best use of people’s costly and limited airtime.

Everyone Can Participate
Design solutions for the technology owned by people now, not in the future. Design with the current infrastructure limitations in mind.

Design Legos, Not Model Car Kits

Giving people a flexible toolkit of parts rather than a prescribed solution to a one problem opens up opportunities for cross-cultural iteration. Instead of forcing people to wait for outsiders to introduce solutions to local problems, creating systems that leverage local knowledge and abilities enables progress to happen more rapidly and collaboratively.

Create Open Ended Systems
To create devices and services that cut across cultures and address needs we might never have anticipated, we must create flexible and adaptable systems that address known needs while being open-ended enough to support novel usage.

Play Well With Others
Remember that the device or your service does not exist in isolation; it will be deployed within an ecosystem that includes human, physical and technological elements. Users may use more than one phone so accounting for portability of information is important. Consider all available assets, including human ones, and how services can utilize these resources.

Be Prepared to Learn & Iterate
Learn from how people use and adapt the solutions you offer them and respond with new iterations. Leverage local knowledge and abilities. One can learn a lot from workarounds and from the ways a device or service is repurposed. Lego has continually adapted their product to reflect the ways people use it, offering increasingly more specialized pieces in response to consumer behavior.

Leapfrog the PC
Unlike the PC, there is no mobile phone divide. Acceptance and access to mobile devices is prevalent throughout the world. Mobile devices will likely be the way people in rural India access information from a network. More than a phone, mobile devices present the opportunity to invent new ways for people to access and interact with information.

Engage the Senses

Regardless of culture, humans have a set of finely honed senses - touch, auditory, visual cognition - that allow us to understand and interact with the world. Unfortunately these senses are overlooked in most technology experiences designed today. The mobile device landscape is dominated by visually-driven interfaces that require reading comprehension to use. Explore and privilege interfaces and interaction models that engage these dormant senses.

Bypass Existing Technology Metaphors

Many mobile device interfaces are have been built on the legacy of previous technology experiences -- namely PC experiences. Efforts should be made to bypass metaphors that borrow from this legacy if they do not significantly improve the experience.

Offer Equal Access

One promise of cloud computing is that it does not require device ownership for access. Device ownership requires a financial commitment that is burdensome to people in emerging markets. Additionally, due to the sheer population numbers of emerging markets, the environmental impact of the existing one-to-one ownership model for mobile devices is not scaleable. Concepts that provide portability of information and facilitate shared/communal device ownership and usage should be pursued.

Generate Awareness & Adoption

Creating mechanisms for facilitating awareness and adoption helps to ensure that all who can benefit from a device or service are aware of and able to use it. The more people have access to the infrastructure enabled by mobile technology, the narrower the digital divide becomes.

Make it Easy to Explain and Spread
Many devices and services are only useful if a critical mass of people are aware of and use them. People should be able to describe the value of the solution and how it’s used quickly and easily, perhaps by relating it to things that already exist in their world (e.g., “It’s like calling a shopkeeper to find out the current market price for milk.”)

Motivate People to Teach, Share and Participate
Devices and services need to motivate people to participate and to spread the word by offering incentives, either implicit (e.g., the solution is more valuable if more people use it) or explicit (e.g., referral bonuses, reputation points). These incentives must be culturally relevant, appealing to local values and aspirations.

Enable Self TeachingIf someone is aware of a service and can use a mobile device, they should be able to access and use it without outside help. Interacting with the device or service should feel as natural as interacting with another person. It should speak the user's language, engage them in a natural dialog and demonstrate proactive efforts to communicate clearly.