Designing Great Digital Products for “New Internet Users”

Smartphone and digital users in the rural areas of India

I happened to come across a very interesting video on “Designing Great Apps for New Internet Users” by Garen Checkley, Product Designer-emerging markets projects at Google and Tracey Chan, Researcher-emerging markets at Youtube. The talk sort of resonated with me personally since they were extending their research and innovations on emerging markets and designing the best experiences for the users in these markets.

This made me write an article that would basically be excerpts taken from the video so people can enjoy reading the contents of it. I urge you to watch the video as they throw a better light on the topic and you would learn a lot of techniques to involve in your designs for designing better digital products for new internet users.

Designing Great Apps for New Internet Users (Google I/O ‘17)

Before understanding what do we need to do to design for New Internet Users let us understand why it is important to design for New Internet Users in emerging markets.

The majority of the people coming online or who are currently online are from the countries of India, Brazil, China, Indonesia, and Nigeria. There are around 2 billion new internet users in the last 15 years majorly from the above-mentioned countries and by 2022, that number will likely swell to around 3 billion, and three times as many internet users will live in emerging markets as in developed markets.

In terms of growth, emerging-market digital consumers represent an enormous opportunity. Even when such consumers don’t buy directly on the internet, information that they find online — typically on a smartphone — often influences their purchasing decisions.

Four years from now, the total value of digitally influenced spending in emerging markets will approach $4 trillion, according to estimate by BCG (Boston Consulting Group for Customer Insight)

Consumer’s Use of the Internet and Digital Usage in Emerging Markets is Booming (Sources: Forrester Research; Economist Intelligence Unit; Internet World Stats; International Telecommunication Union; World band Oxford Economics; BCG Analysis)

“Hence there are plentiful opportunities for companies that understand the unique characteristics of each emerging-user market to innovate across the technology spectrum — from semiconductors and radio networks to mobile apps and cloud services. And as designers and innovators, we cannot ignore this emergence and we need to empathize with these markets to provide them the best, delightful experiences they deserve and desire. “

To design better digital products for these emerging markets Garen Checkley and Tracy Chan have come up with an interesting framework with 3 buckets which consists of 3 elements in each of the buckets.

The framework shared by Garen Checkley and Tracy Chan for designing great apps for new internet users. Source: Designing Great Apps for New Internet Users (Google I/O ‘17)

Now talking about the first bucket, USABLE, it has 3 elements within;

1. Cost
2. Connectedness
3. Compatibility

Cost

The user behavior as observed in India regarding purchasing the data is that they feel the data just like money. Hence they purchase the data based on their usage and budget it accordingly. When it comes to Wifi usage in India there are around 3 lac wifi hotspots as of 2019 according to DigiAnalysys report which distills to 1 wifi hotspot for every 390 people making public hotspot/wifi rare and weak.

“ The experience can be made better here by providing transparency and control over data consumption for data-heavy tasks so that they know how much data they are spending in their action”

An example from Youtube Go where they provide the transparency of data consumption to download a video. Source: Designing Great Apps for New Internet Users (Google I/O ‘17)

Connectedness

India’s average internet speed is 3x slower than the USA and the new internet users usually come online in a slower connection.

For these conditions “design states like offline, loading, retry and success clearly and make the great connectivity the edge case.”

If the users are offline or even when the data is on and there is no connectivity give them feedback or action to perform, like an option to download the content once the connection is back.

Chrome’s offline page has a download page later option which informs the user what’s going on even when the page is offline. Source: Designing Great Apps for New Internet Users (Google I/O ‘17)

Compatibility

50% of the smartphones sold in India are mid-budget and low-budget phones which don’t have the same contrast and resolution as of a premium device screen. Since smartphones are expensive it has been observed people don’t throw away their phones when it's broken and tend to use the broken phone until they get a new one and when a new phone comes the broken phone is still used by another family member. Hence lower budgets and broken phones are still part of the ecosystem in which people are using our products.

“Design clearer, larger, farther apart affordances to prevent mistaken taps caused by bad/broken screens and high contrast environment.”

Also pairing together icon and text can really help people understand or remember what affordance does.

An example screen from Youtube Go where large buttons with icon and text pairing are used with high contrast to avoid wrong taps and provide the user with better visibility when you are using the device under sunlight. Source: Designing Great Apps for New Internet Users (Google I/O ‘17)

With this One bucket I will wrap up this article today and I will write about the next two buckets in Part 2 of this article series next week so stay tuned and follow me on medium for more such interesting articles. I hope you have enjoyed reading this article as much as I did when I wrote this piece.

Keep Designing . Stay Humble ✌️