A few days ago I was honoured to interview Camilla Nestor, Vice President of Financial Services at Grameen Foundation, about their recent report on the Use of Mobile Services Among Poor Women. Inspired by the realization that the majority of women they were seeking to target with their mobile money deployments couldn’t use the technology, Grameen launched a three-country study on barriers to use of mobile financial services by poor women with findings that all of us in the mobile for development sector – from mobile operators and VAS providers to NGOs – can use to address the usability issues that are preventing poor women from benefitting from mobile services. Despite its research focus on mobile financial services, the report’s findings are applicable across mobile service sectors and can and should be kept in mind when designing mobile services for poor women. The full text of the interview is below.
KR: What prompted Grameen Foundation to conduct this research?
CN: A few years ago, when we first started strategically using mobile services to engage with women, we saw on the ground that our target market – women living below $2.50/day – wasn’t able to use the mobile services we were developing for them with our partners. We had the target market in mind while developing these services but we didn’t apply the full human-centered design (HCD) process that we do now – it was before we had that worked into our process.
This realization began emerging during pilot testing, but we didn’t have the flexibility to change the user interface at the time so we worked on upskilling the channel to help the women become more comfortable with the technology as a fix for this specific deployment. Realizing that we had made some assumptions about ability to both access and use the service that were wrong, it was clear early on that we had some challenges given the level of assistance from agents and field workers that was required to perform basic financial functions on the mobile phone – thus we decided to conduct research into the barriers we were seeing around usability and really dig into developing the full HCD process that we use now.
KR: What was most different or most unique across geographies?
CN: There were two interesting things that stuck out as we analysed the research findings in terms of geography:
- We expected age to be a driver in ability and comfort in India, as it was in Uganda and the Philippines, but it wasn’t in India. In India, literacy/education levels were the main driver in our small sample. Anecdotally, the younger children (ages 10-12) were more comfortable with technology and were often showing the women in our surveys how to use the phones (survey sampling age started at 19). The point for us there was that this isn’t something that will solve itself in five years – if women of 19 and 20 are unable to use the technology, five, ten years from now those same women will continue to have problems and be a key part of our target market.
- Common across geographies was the theme that marketing/information about mobile financial services simply wasn’t getting to women; operators and mobile money providers weren’t using the right channels to reach poor women. There’s an opportunity for tweaks to existing above the line marketing to reach poor women and below the line marketing to really intentionally reach poor women where they’re at – in the home, in locations where ‘offline’ networks of women gather like the market or women’s centers.
KR: Were there any shortcomings in the research you would adapt in the future?
CN: Often in a usability study you want to put different user interfaces out and then iterate, see how usability improves; we would love to do that in partnership with an operator in the future, and that type of research could be a nice follow-on to give us dynamic information on an iterative process of user interface design.
We’d also like to expand the research to other geographies, more countries in Africa in particular. We expect similar trends but also want to see how the research findings parse out in other African countries, as well as investigate markets where we’re seeing mobile money take off and figuring out what is working there for women.
KR: What are the key takeaways from your report for operators from your perspective?
CN:
- Design for the lowest common denominator: if a granny in a village can use service, anyone can. Simpler is better, simple is best. Also test in the field, and test prototypes early through a paper testing process before investing in a build and then being stuck with a UI that the market can’t use.
- Market where women are: leverage creative thinking and test different approaches, as successful below the line marketing is very specific to the target geography.
KR: How has this or will this research influence the work that Grameen Foundation does?
CN: HCD approaches will be applied across all our mobile work in the near future. We’re in the process of adapting our HCD approach to our agriculture and health work, especially in our VAS design, from both a content and delivery perspective.
KR: What barriers do you encounter when applying an HCD approach and how do you overcome them?
CN:
- External barriers of funding and time, though we’re working internally to cut the time of the process down without compromising the impact of the approach, to help our commercial partners get more excited about HCD as well.
- Staff needs – you need local staff who speak local language to do usability testing with local users.
- Tech phobia – don’t go into the field with ten people with ten iPhones, clicking away at photos and such. A single person should own the technology, and everyone else is a quiet observer.
- If working with women, be cognizant of creating an environment that is safe for honest feedback and be aware of local power structures in a field situation.