Jan Chipchase

The UN estimates that there are approximately 800 million illiterate consumers worldwide and in addition not all consumers use products that support their primary language. To what extent do designs need to cater for, or specifically design for the illiterate?
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For many living on the edge of the grid, power comes in the form of a car battery which in domestic contexts can last up to one month to run a light bulb or two; keep a radio and mobile phone charged; and for occasional television use. Refrigerators are not worth purchasing unless there is continued access to electricity. Charging a car battery take ~3 days: one day to pick up and drop off; a day to charge, and this can take significantly longer if the locale where it is normally charged does not itself have electricity.

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Is it possible to experience the core benefits of mobile phone ownership without having a mobile phone?

In contexts where income is highly variable people living on the poverty line are more likely to be forced to sell off assets in order to buy essentials such as food. The mobile phone is such an asset. The net result is that there are people with a sufficient technological literacy to understand what a phone can do, a nuanced understanding of the communication norms, own an active SIM card but no mobile phone and most likely live in a community where people understand the variability of income and ownership. In these contexts it can be socially acceptable to ask peers, even strangers to borrow their phone, take out their SIM, insert their own and send off text messages or make calls – since the monetary costs are passed on the SIM card owner.

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Not all transactions are created equal: the very last dollar in your wallet has a higher value than when there’s a stack of notes; an online transaction completed at home has different security implications than one completed in an internet cafe. Service designers have long recognized the need for extra checks and balances for ‘risker’ transactions – and these are typically reflected by levels of authentification. From a user’s perspective we’ve found it useful to frame transactions in terms of thresholds of concern and thresholds of alarm.
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Following on from last week’s post on the concept of ‘mediated use’ – asking someone to complete all or part of a task that the user is unable, or unwilling to do – how motivated are agents in helping customers complete all or some of the task?

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Textual and technical illiteracy is often cited as a barrier to the adoption of services and by default the benchmark for success is often set at ‘understanding and completing the task by oneself’. However if there are ‘literate’ people nearby to what extent does it matter that the user is illiterate?
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Simply proving who you are can present a problem for migrant workers. In many factory and manual laboring jobs the employer takes the worker’s identity card as a form of collateral to be returned at the end of the contract and/or when a replacement is found.

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There was a time when mobile phones were seen as a plaything of the rich – the image of of the mobile phone as a yuppie toy took a long time to be dispelled. Whilst CGAP readers are switched on to the benefits and occasional drawbacks of access to basic financial services it is sometimes necessary to remind our colleagues and clients of the merits of universal access. The question that us most commonly asked is: given their relatively low level of income, to what extent do the unbanked need access to mobile money services? Read the rest of this page »

Today we welcome a new series of blog posts from Jan Chipchase. Jan has spent a decade exploring the intersection of technology, people and culture for Nokia and frog design, and specializes in turning insights into opportunities. Jan sits on the advisory board for the Institute for Money, Technology and Financial Inclusion. His frequent updates from around the world can be found at www.janchipchase.com.

The largest disruptions in mobile phone use over existing practices have come from the very personal nature of mobile phone ownership. Photo by Jan Chipchase

It’s common for cell phone service developers to become fixated on mobility – a little semantic recalibration can be useful if you’re trying to set colleagues down the right path.

Arguably the largest disruptions in mobile phone use over existing practices have come from the very personal nature of mobile phone ownership: incoming and outgoing communication; social networking; web browsing and media consumption; search queries are now by default a private matter with sharing a matter of choice.

There are of course exceptions – it is wrong to assume that personal mobile phone ownership results solely in personal use – some devices are shared amongst families and businesses; it can be socially or contextually inappropriate to refuse to hand over a mobile phone when requested; use may be mediated through more technically or textually literate peers; and every day many mobile phones are indirectly shared after being lost or stolen. But broadly speaking the privacy afforded by personal ownership, its pocketable size and the modalities of use it supports make the mobile phone well suited to tasks that we prefer to keep private – including those in the realm of personal finance and transactions.

This time it’s personal.

Actually it always has been.

-Jan Chipchase