This is the first of a two-part series on addressing technical literacy as a barrier for women. The post features the work of Indosat.
Technical literacy is often quoted as one of the main barriers that hinder mobile phone uptake from women in emerging and developing countries: in our seminal ‘Women and Mobile: a Global Opportunity’, we found that 22 per cent of women surveyed in Egypt, India, Papua New Guinea and Uganda did not use the mobile phone because they didn’t know how to use it. But the mobile landscape is evolving at a dramatic pace and, as highlighted by the report ‘Scaling Mobile for Development: harness the opportunity in the developing world’, while basic or feature phones currently dominate the mobile phone market in developing countries, they will soon be reached by the uptake of smartphones. Specifically, the economic growth and the decrease in the cost of the handset are likely to enable people in developing markets to migrate from basic and feature phones to smartphones after 2017.
As smartphones become more affordable and thus more widespread, they will be the tool through which women in developing countries access information and the internet. If we want to ensure that women in emerging markets can take full advantage of the next mobile revolution via smartphones, we need to recognise that adopting a user-centric design when developing mobile products and services can be a powerful way to overcome the technical literacy barrier and hence, to make the use of a mobile phone easier and more intuitive to resource-poor women.
Last year, in an effort to create awareness within the industry about the importance of women-centred user design, we partnered with USAID to launch the ‘Design Challenge’, which aimed to redefine the smartphone user experience for resource-poor women in developing countries. Sponsored by Ooredoo (ex Qtel), the challenge was won by three young designers with ‘Sahel Shake’, with the prospects of working with Indosat and launching it in the Indonesian market. ‘Sahel Shake’ winning design featured simple iconography, a battery management widget, an airtime management widget, phone sharing features, phonebook management and emergency options, and a voice-enabled SMS reading feature. In other words, the design was simple, intuitive, and seemed easy to use, and, as a result, was refined, built, prototyped and tested in the Indonesian market.
However, while the idea looked good on paper, when put into practice the team ran into a number of issues. First, the name ‘Sahel Shake’, stemming from Arabic, did not mean anything to Indonesian women – hence the app was renamed Wobe (‘women’s benefit’ in Indonesian) to make it more appealing to the target market. Second, while the app was developed in-house by a women-only development and commercial team, the prototype soon ran into some Indonesia-specific challenges to adoption:
- Smartphone penetration in Indonesia is ~23%, while basic and feature phones account for 77% of the Indonesian mobile market. Therefore, the resource-poor women that the Wobe app was trying to target, did not even have a smartphone in the first place
- Indosat found that the resource-poor women tended to use their phone only for voice and SMS and that less than 15% used their phone for more than just receiving and making calls and sending SMS. Thus, the problem was not a lack of adoption of the Indosat service, but rather underutilisation
- The percentage of literacy among women in Indonesia is 99% – hence, the main driver for adoption of the Wobe app is not literacy (intended as using the phone in order to become literate) but rather aspiration
- The original design of the app, while easy and intuitive, was not appealing to them because of the lack of femininity
Hence, the uptake of the Wobe app amongst Indonesian women was pretty low (just a few thousand women were using it). However, Indosat managed to turn the situation around and to leverage the existing design by adapting it to the Indonesian female market. How it was done, will be discussed in the next blog!