May 18, 2009

Our Primary Research: Understanding How People Use Mobile Phones in Rural India

Understanding user motivations and intentions is critical to designing good experiences. In most cases the users we speak with are comfortable with products with complex interactions and deep functionality. The Mobile Literacy project gave us the opportunity to speak with people who live in rural areas of the developing world who bring a fresh, unblemished perspective on the devices we take for granted: mobile phones.

For this project, our researchers Natasha Alani and Sebastian Heycke set out to uncover the needs of a population that product designers and manufacturers often overlook and who are not part of a typical product target market. Natasha Alani, our lead design researcher, describes her motivations:

“Empowering the underserved is a long-held theme of my personal and professional life. While living in both rural Uganda and China, I recognized that mobile phones had reached the most remote areas, yet people often turned to me and other westerners for help with basic actions. For this research project, we chose the Kutch region of India because I speak the local language and would be able to get natural observations of people’s experience with mobile phones. Through our research, we were able to see that this often illiterate population had not been previously exposed to concepts such as heirarchial menus or scrolling text, and icons that had no cultural relevance. In addition, rural populations often don’t receive the benefit of thoughtful design because their needs are not advocated for and the primary research is not effectively shared with the greater design community.”

Below is a map of the Kutch district of western India with markers for each interview site.

You can download the research participant profiles to learn more about the people we interviewed. The profiles include a photograph of the participant, basic demographic information, and some interesting information from the interview.

Research Methods

Performing research in rural areas of developing countries is different, to say the least. It isn’t possible to contact a traditional research recruiter to find your target population demographic, stopping people in the street isn’t met with success, and walking into a small rural village asking for folks who haven’t used a mobile device before was only met with skepticism and more questions about our true intentions.

Natasha and Sebastian discovered that in order to identify research subjects you need to entrench yourself in their society, understand the social rules for gaining trust and accessing information, and then, like everyone else in that culture, use that system to slowly work from one contact to another until you find the ideal research subject. To this end, we owe a large debt to Abhiyan, an NGO initially set up to support recovery efforts from a major cyclone in 1998 and then remained to support recovery from a major earthquake that hit the district in 2001. Their approach, “which is marked by a fundamental belief in self-help, confidence-building and enabling local villagers to meet, organize and carry out their own needs assessment and handing over the relief operations to the hands of the “beneficiaries” with minimum supervision” has led to an active role in the Kutch community to set up a framework for self-governance and development. After an extensive interview, they agreed to give our design researchers access to their network of workers and volunteers. Our intention of making this research available under Creative Commons was instrumental to this agreement.

While Abhiyan provided a way into the community, each person along the way also needed to be told of our research intentions and our desire to make this research available to everyone. And step by step, person by person, community by community, our researchers went from one of the largest Indian cities, to a regional commercial center, to a small rural village, to a family compound on the edge of the Thar desert.

This was the most extreme design research that we have ever undertaken. Our practitioners experienced extreme conditions, in Bhuj they slept in guest houses and when they went into they villages and family compounds they slept on mats on the ground. They arrived in India after the monsoon season and were exposed to high temperatures (30ºC/90ºF). They carried all of the recording equipment (voice and video recorders, notebooks, cameras) as well as all the water they may need for a day or two as they traveled by local bus, motorcycle, or hired car. This was coupled with the stress of negotiating in a new and very different culture to get to ideal candidates for this research.

When Natasha and Sebastian finally met with a research participant, they observed the participant in their environment, meeting their family, sharing a meal, and for those who lived in very rural areas, staying the night at their compound sleeping on the dirt floor of a village hut, before an interview began. This allowed the design researchers to observe how the participants lived and conducted business before a single question was asked. Clearly one advantage in performing this research was the team that we had available to us. Natasha is descended from the Kutch area and is able to speak Kutchii, which allowed for a smaller team as we didn’t have to depend on translators.

The Primary Research

Below you will find the videos from our research interviews and our research findings. Some of the original videos were quite long, but for the purposes of this research we narrowed the footage to the most compelling sections. All of this work is being released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License. We know that many companies might be able to use this research and findings to validate research and assumptions they many already have. If you do use our research, we’d like to request you make a donation to Abhiyan, the NGO that is continuing to provide support for the self-organization of Kutch communities and was instrumental in making the research possible.

To make a donation to Abhiyan:

Name of the Bank: Punjab National Bank, Bhuj Branch, Station Road, Bhuj.

Name of the account holder: Kutch Nav Nirman Abhiyan

Bank Account No.: 126 00 00 100 17 44 60

Bank Swift Code: PUNB IN BB KFZ

Sort Code: -NIL-

IBAN: -NIL-

Abhiyan’s address:

Kutch Nav Nirman Abhiyan

Dr. Rajaram Campus, Nr. St. Xaviers School,

Bhuj-Kutch-370001.

Telefax: (02832) 221379/82

Website: www.kutchabhiyan.org

email: .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

Our goal is for this research to make an impact on the lives of the participants in the area, either through new devices, services, or donations to the people that made this research possible.