The Current Mobile Phone Market & Interaction Design in India

by Kin Fai Law and Eva Shon

A discussion of the current state of the mobile phone market in India and an exploration of some contextual interaction design principles.

(Photo by Tapan Parikh)



Introduction

Mobile phone adoption in developing countries has grown dramatically in the past several years. However there are still many obstacles to mobile phone ubiquity in these regions, particularly for people in rural areas and those living at subsistence or poverty levels. Moreover, network coverage is weak in remote areas, and the market for distributing mobile phones and a culture of using them is still at an incipient stage.

Observing how inhabitants of the developing world are beginning to adapt mobile phone use to their benefit and distinctive needs is interesting to watch. Contrasting them with usage habits in developed countries provides insight into how to foster better technology design for the 3rd world, so that it can be more useful to people in those contexts.

While the popularity of mobile phones in developing countries is on the rise, most people in subsistence societies still cannot afford to own them. Despite this, even those who cannot afford this technology are still beginning to acquire access to their benefits by methods of sharing. This paper attempts to examine how current mobile phone use has proliferated, how it has been customized to the context of the working poor in India, and attempts to summarize some good design principles.


The Indian Context

The GDP of India is about $820, but a quarter of the population live below the Indian government’s defined poverty line of about US $146 a year. [1] After basic needs, even one of the cheapest cell phones on the market, at US $35 (1,350 rupees), is still prohibitive for most people. Also rural areas of India remain less networked outside their micro- and meso-spheres and have less need for mobile phone use. Although among the middle and upper economic classes mobile phone penetration in urban India is around 25 per 100 people, mobile phone penetration in rural areas is at a mere 1.6 per 100.

However Nokia has claimed that India is expected to overtake the U.S. to become its No. 2 market by volume by 2010. And although penetration is not as high, in 2006 India overtook China in the number of new telephone subscribers per month. "It's a source of constant delight to me to find cellphones in the hands of the unlikeliest of my fellow citizens: taxi drivers, paanwallahs, farmers, fisherfolk," according to Shashi Tharoor, the former Under-Secretary General for Communications for the UN. [2] In terms of affordability, in an already highly competitive industry along with an influx of Chinese mobile phone manufacturers into the Indian market, the cost of cell phones is decreasing.


Constraints vs. Opportunities

A major constraint with rural mobile phone use is recharging them in areas that are off the power grid. There are people who walk 20 km a day just to charge their phones because their villages do not have electricity. [3] Stories like this reflect how cell phone use is highly valuable to rural communities in India, and they often play an important role in connecting family, close friends, as well as business contacts and information sources. However making power the chief design constraint for all rural contexts may not be the most beneficial long-term strategy. As mobile phones become more important to communities the technology begins to "pay for itself," and the more resourceful people become in supporting their use. One project that provides mobile phones to rural entrepreneurs also offer kits with a large booster antenna and special cables for connecting to car battery or solar power sources as alternatives when off the grid. [4]

Currently the cheapest phones implement cost-saving and power-saving measures by reducing features: black and white screens rather than color, not installing cameras or options such as internet access, GPS or 3G services, and other cost-saving innovations discussed by another group on this site analyzing the Motofone F3. However a key design question question is whether features such as internet service might be useful to have in remote contexts. Education, healthcare, local markets and information distribution are areas in which better applications and web services for remote users are being developed, such as the M-Education initiative by Tata Teleservices [5] and CellBazaar by Grameenphone, which, like Craigslist, enables "rural folks to sell and trade their goods and increased price transparency." [6] Another project called Knownet-Grin aims to foster peer-to-peer "learning societies" by providing a repository of "grassroots innovations developed by farmers, artisans" and provides a multi-lingual and multi-modal database of shared innovations. [7] Although this project implemented info kiosks in several regions, an interface for mobile phones is certainly imaginable.

Additionally, Aditya Dev Sood of the Center for Knowledge Societies has identified the following areas in which mobile phones have the potential to provide useful services in India:

• Identity management (for those without a fixed or legal home)
• Commercial and personal transport management
• Micro-finance, organizing larger spheres of business and mobile currency
• Healthcare outreach
• Government services and information
• Mobile education and infotainment

The above opportunities suggest that efforts to improve design for developing countries should explore balancing the power-feature-cost ratios in ways that are more considerate of the social, economic, political and cultural opportunities a mobile phone may provide to people. Yet these opportunities have different requirements, and they can be very different for rural vs. urban contexts. Therefore mobile service and technology design for a country like India has to be highly contextual and more sensitive to grassroots scenarios [8]. The next few sections discuss some examples.


Nokia Campaign to Teach Rural Poor about the "Concept" of Cellphones

Many Indian rural villagers do not have a "concept" of using mobile phones. Nokia, one market leader in India, attempted to educate villages about mobile phones by sending a fleet of twelve vans outfitted with distinctive blue Nokia-branded phones to travel through rural areas. The main goal for the sale representatives in this campaign was not to sell phones, but rather to establish the concept of mobile phones, and promote their potential benefit to the villages. When a large enough audience was gathered, the representatives would also explain the basics of how the phones work. This is also part of a Nokia initiative to target rural customers with their lower-end product lines by parking Nokia train cars in rural stations to promote their products. [9]


Shared Phone Use in Rural Villages

Generally, in a rural area only a few members of a village might be able to afford a cell phone so it is common for other villagers to visit a phone owner and pay to use them right there. Even in urban contexts, mobile phone carts for renting minutes are popular. Grameen Bank, the first microfinance institution in India, has an entrepreneurshipprogram that allows people to become such village providers, called the Village Phone Program. [4] This common model in rural areas of sharing a cell phone among a community is interesting considering that they were originally designed as personal devices.

What types of features and design choices might benefit such contexts more? Consider the social habits that form around rural village scenarios: how do protocols, social practices and trust develop? If calling village to village without an appointment between parties, does the phone service entrepreneur have to take messages and relay them to members of the community later on? Are there basic features on these phones such as being able to record parts of a conversation? Are there privacy vs. transparency issues? One study has shown that identity privacy is often less of a concern among people in India [10], but should it become part of technology education initiatives as phones become more important to commerce and social networking? Can these phones be designed to also support multiple users trying to share and negotiate a single interface? Are there easy ways for the owner of the phone, who might have a varying degree of literacy, to do basic accounting to keep track of their phone service?


SMS & "Missed Call" Schemes

Many cell phone users in India try to avoid using up airtime with voicemail. Instead they often text SMS messages, which is said to be much more common in many parts of Asia than in the U.S. SMS is seen as less intrusive andtypically involves very concise messages that are cheaper to send and receive than voicemails.

Similar to this SMS-style of interaction are elaborate schemes in India of signaling using "missed calls" as a way to avoid airtime charges. When calling someone with whom you have set up a code with, you can let it ring once or twice, and then cut the call before being connected. A husband may give his wife a "missed call" at the end of the work day to let her know he is heading home. Or someone may give a missed call to a friend they commute with to indicate that they’re ready to be picked up. [11] Missed calls can still be very informative: you can interpret the message based on who it is from, the time of day, the number of rings, and the known routines of participants. Although mobile service providers are not likely to want to promote this style of interaction because it goes against their profit model, it offers us a glimpse into how more cost-effective communication schemes can be developed for mobile phones by users just trying to save money.


Conclusion

We have discussed issues in mobile technology and services development in India. In summary, design in this area is best informed by diverse local contexts and exploring a wide array of alternative trade-offs rather than just targeting current constraints.

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Appendix on Interaction Design

Tapan Parikh is an human-computer interaction researcher who has done in-the-field design studies of mobile device interaction among micro-finance groups in rural India. The following notes and slide summarize some of his guidelines [12] for designing mobile applications and technology for this context:

• Collaborative interfaces shared among multiple users: one person often controls the interface, eg. for kiosks. May require explaining the interactions and ways to show indirect users and have them understand/share/agree in the process
  
• Intermittent power and connectivity require more asynchronous communication options: SMS, MMS, Email
• Accessibility of interface to varying degrees of literacy (even simple infographics require some literacy)
• Local language audio builds trust and comfort with the technology
• Guide users through the task (MSR uses videos to present user scenarios)
• Realistic icons (like photos of users to represent 'the user')
• Different modalities of infrastructure: aggregating data vs. distributing data, smart client vs. smart server
• Decentralization of processing steps
• Numeric keypads: text entry difficult
• Most mobile UI research has focused on improving small screen display, what about alternative browsing methods rather than the point-and-click paradigm
  
• Many disparate operating systems for mobile devices, lack of application portability across all devices and service providers
• Feature-Cost-Power ratio
• Paper forms more intuitive for accounting b/c it mimicked the original ledger activity, then use simple, barebones text entry for numeric input plus audio and images instead of text
• Importance of testing in the field, in different communities, different regions, and building trust first

The following are some other notes that reflect areas of content services innovation for mobile phones:

• Browsing at modem speeds is difficult, existing efforts to design a mobile-friendly web: Mobile Wikipedia, http://winksite.com, Mosoko, mobile browsers: Firefox Mobile, Opera Mini
  

• This platform can also be inspired by alternative UIs, some of which were designed for visually impaired users: Resource on alternative UIs, Voice browsers, WeMedia Talking Browser
  

• IVR: TellMe, possible to convert RSS to IVR (but does RSS come in different dialects/languages)? Form processing IVR: general Form Usability Principles
  

References

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_India

[2] "Meanwhile: India's Cellphone Revolution," by Shashi Tharoor. International Herald Tribune, Feb. 2, 2007.

[3] "Five mile walk to recharge phones" posted by Romania. From textually.org, Category: Mobile Phone Projects, Third World

[4] Village Phone Program by the Grameen Foundation, FAQ

[5] "Tata Indiacom Presents India's First M-Education Service" from correspondents in Maharashtra, India.India eNews, Jan. 25, 2008.

[6] "Grameenphone CellBazaar wins Global Mobile Award," Grameenphone Ltd. press release, Feb. 13, 2008.

[7] Knowledge Network for Augmenting Grassroots Innovations, a HoneyBee project

[8] Aditya Dev Sood, "How to Use Mobile Phones for Development." EduComm Asia Quarterly, Vol. 12, No. 4, June 2007.

[9] “For the rural poor, cellphones come calling” by Heather Timmons. International Herald Tribune, May 6, 2007.

[10] Kumaraguru, P. and Cranor, L. "Privacy in India: Attitudes and Awareness," CMU School of Computer Science, 2005.

[11] “Mobile phone Lifeline for World’s Poor, “ by Tatum Anderson. BBC News, Feb. 19, 2007.

[12] Tapan Parikh, "Designing Appropriate Computing Technologies for Rural Development," Presentation slides for UCSD CSE Distinguished speaker lecture, March 14, 2007.


Research Links:

• Interaction Design-related:

CHI 2007 workshop papers on user-driven design for International Development

• Field Research:

Jan Chipchase, Indri Tulusan. "Shared Phone Practices: Exploratory Field Research from Uganda and Beyond," Future Perfect blog.