In the M4D community, there is a lot of talk around “user-centric design” – what does it mean? How can you cost-effectively design user-centred services on short time lines? How can we embrace and learn from failures by others who stumbled by not paying enough attention to their customers? The GSMA mWomen team recently spent time in India visiting with our three grantees as well as attending the Grameen event Designing for Adoption and Scale in Mumbai to explore some of these questions and the implications for working with women at the base of the pyramid.
Three key themes emerged from the week, including:
- Customers know what they need
- Start slow, so you can go fast later
- Sometimes, failure to be user-centric is just failure
Customers know what they need. The picture you see is of Bhavana – she is a salt farmer and rural entrepreneur in Gujarat, India and part of the network of SEWA Rudibens (ben = sister). She lives in a desolate desert for 5 months of the year in the Rann of Kutch with her family and produces salt by hand through an intricate system of water pumped from 20+ meters below the ground into salt fields that are tilled manually by pulling a plough four hours a day to ensure the salt crystals form. SEWA, the organization that supports Bhavana’s efforts, helps small scale producers like her process and sell the products back into their own communities. For these five months of the year, she lives with her extended family and away from her daughter who maintains Bhavana’s status as a micro-entrepreneur by managing her small business through her mobile phone and a tool developed by the Vodafone Foundation and the Cherie Blair Foundation for Women. Our mWomen Innovation Fund grant is helping to improve this mobile ordering and inventory management tool to make it more user-friendly as well as link it to Vodafone M-PESA, a mobile money platform, for payments.
We spent an afternoon speaking with a group of over twenty Rudibens who live in rural Gujarat to understand their needs better. The first question we asked this group was about the challenges they face in running their businesses. The answers we received were as thoughtful as they were indicative of the deep entrepreneurial spirit and drive these women exhibit.
What we heard was that, at first, local people did not trust their products. The idea of a high quality, locally sourced yet affordable product that an individual woman sells door-to-door seemed too good to be true. To get over this hurdle, some women conducted public product demonstrations comparing their products to local store offerings while others offered money-back guarantees or even bundled the products as a package in order to get new customers. As word spread and more and more customers switched from traditional grocery channels, the competition started to notice – some shop keepers discounted heavily the day before a Rudiben visited to get rid of inventory and others even offered to pay them not to sell their goods. Aside from the reaction from the competition, many women expressed concern that as their businesses quickly expand, they have to carry more cash over long distances in desolate areas – so theft and personal safety are real risks.
Women also faced personal challenges depending on their own life experiences which they found practical solutions to overcome. For example, we heard from an older woman, who self-identified as illiterate, who said that she focuses only on weddings (the highest value customers) to fuel her business since it allows for her to circumvent writing by having the cooks provide orders in written form that she then has trusted friends enter into mobile phones. Similarly, other women who self-identified as illiterate or semi-literate, also rely on their daughters to help use the mobile tools to manage their orders since they don’t know how to use the phones themselves. That’s just smart.
So, what does this all mean for serving women at the base of the pyramid? As you can see, they know what they need so designing mobile products to meet these needs requires spending time listening to these customers attentively. For instance, services like mobile money have a real potential to help them both save time and increase their personal safety. And for illiterate and semi-literate women, thinking through how to design products that are pictorially based or designing products that appeal to both mothers and daughters could help mobile operators drive adoption as well as provide valuable services for the poor.
Start slow, so you can go fast later. We know that women are less likely to own and use mobile phones than men and, as a result, not realize the full benefits of mobile technology including feeling safer, more empowered, and having access to services like mobile money. Still, the truth is, as an M4D community, we are not yet designing and scaling up enough usable, relevant products and services for these women at the base of the pyramid. Don’t get me wrong, this is by no means an easy task and there are lots of talented, dedicated people around the world working on this issue.
With the support of organizations like SEWA, entrepreneurial women at the base of the pyramid are tapping into their potential and growing their own businesses. Unfortunately, many women in India don’t have this kind of support. Recent research from Intermedia found that only 31% of women owned phones, though 84% had access to them. However, focus group discussions revealed that the most disempowered women in India don’t have access to a phone even if there is one in the household.
These issues are complex and there are no quick fixes. Mobile technology offers one lever to help empower women. Taking the time to understand the key barriers for women at the base of the pyramid and understanding that they are not one segment will help inform how to reach them. With the pressures of managing to quarterly reports and bottom lines, it is often difficult to devote time on probing consumer insights research and user-centric design principles. However, investing time during the design phase will help to accelerate uptake and usage later and can mean the difference between a successful and a failed product.
Sometimes failure to be user-centric is just failure. During Grameen’s Designing for Adoption and Scale conference in Mumbai, there was excellent guidance around how to integrate user-centric design principles into organizations as well as many great stories of success and failures in the M4D space. However, what stuck out most was that many of these stories seemed to actually be failures to be user-centric. In one example, a speaker described a huge investment in a mobile health application designed for HIV/AIDS patients in sub-Saharan Africa but, when the product went to market, it turned out that none of the target population owned or had access to mobile phones! This kind of story is all too common and is a lesson that seems to be hard to swallow. However, these mistakes are also easy to fix by simply spending more time with customers and conducting basic market research.
In the end, meeting and listening to female customers such as the entrepreneurs of the Rudiben network is simply essential to create useful and usable services that can make a difference in their lives and to drive adoption and usage in the long term.