Lessons on 'context'. Kiva - Cats that donate

I've been reading about Kiva. Its an amazing project that can turn anyone online with a credit card into a micro lender. If you always wanted to be a part of an MFI but couldn't get yourself to move beyond the edge of your office cubicle, Kiva puts you thousands of miles away, just a credit card and CVV number away from the wallet of a micro-entrepreneur.

I admire the way Kiva has touched the lives of thousands of people. But heres a candid confession made on his blog that takes my respect for its founder Matt Flannery a notch higher. It is a lesson on the importance of 'context' and communication. Every product, solution or communication is usually made on the basis of its 'context'. Take things out of their intended context and plop 'em in another - suddenly a perfectly sane piece begins to sound bizzare.

Catfood and Commoditization. In this blog Matt observes how the simple (and innocent) act of a lender in America setting his pet cat as his online avatar on Kiva leads to (an equally innocent) confusion for its recipient in Africa.

I heard a story recently from a Kiva Fellow stationed in Africa who, when showing the entrepreneur his lenders, was asked the cat question. How does that work? Why has a cat lent to me? How can a cat lend to me? Does that cat really want his money back? (he looks pretty fat).

Funny but true. Even at Eko, our User Interface was made keeping in mind a context. The context is an unbanked majority in India who however have access to mobile phones. Dig a few layers deeper - a majority of these handsets are Ultra Low Cost Handsets. - almost all the users are just number literate - most of them are pre-paid mobile users.

Eko's interface that uses just number dialing fits this context really well. But the trouble starts when analyzed by and within the frameworks of smart-phone toting, iPod sporting executives like you and me, the interface appears hopelessly outdated, outmoded, complex and what not. I've just been back from a field visit to rural Bihar and I couldn't help but imagine how useless it might be to give an illiterate villager a special 'hard-bound' edition of 'The fortune at the bottom of the pyramid' - being hard-bound he can't even feed it to his goats!

Mobile and the non/semi literate

One of the roles that I take on at Eko is that of a an observer of the mobile-and-user relationship. While yesteryear's India might have been defined by a turban-clad snake charmer, a man on the street clutching a mobile handset very much describes an average Indian today.

A mobile based service (like eko) which aims at reaching out to a billion such 'mobile' Indians today has to contend with another truth - illiteracy. If this Times of India article is right, our illiterate population equals the entire population of the USA!

At Tinfo Mobile, this fact had driven me to design an application series titled TeachMe Akshara which would run on even the basic mobile handsets supporting Java (which were then being given out by Reliance Communications for prices as low as 500 bucks). The purpose of this app was to teach its users the basic alphabets of Indian languages. This news article on Digit magazine talked about that app. Unfortunately, that app never got formally deployed and I've moved on.

What was amazing about Eko was that the great folks here had put in a great deal of research and thought into this problem and had come out with a mobile interface that could be used by even the most basic mobile user, because the solution involved nothing more than dialing!

Resonating with the Eko team's findings, is this research paper published a few years ago by the Nokia Research Center authored by Jan Chipchase - a pioneer in mobile usage research. Here is a link to the research paper titled: Understanding Non-Literacy as a Barrier to Mobile Phone Communication

The following excerpt is particularly interesting:

...
The simple answer is that non-literate mobile phone users can call, but cannot message or use the address book. The subtleties are more interesting than this.

Two basic tasks were easy for almost all our participants to complete: turning on the phone and answering an incoming call. Beyond this, there were various degrees of success. Dialing a local phone number is relatively easy, but problems can occur when there are variations such as dialing a national or international number, or using IP telephone prefixes. ...