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Smart People, Dumb People

This person is smart. She owns a mobile phone and she's using public infrastructure to make a phone call. But why? A mobile phone lets her communicate when she likes, with whom she likes, from where she likes, pretty much how she likes (ok, as long as its voice call or text message).

Whilst the mobile phone offers the key benefits of personal, convenient, synchronous and asynchronous communication people often opt to use and will go out of their way to use public infrastructure because its simply cheaper. Some of you are reading this and thinking 'so what?' But if you work in the telecoms industry (which a number readers of this site do) you are likely to be out of touch with most people's reality. When is the last time you looked at your phone bill? Most people consider the cost of a call, of sending a message weighing up the pros and cons of the available alternatives. Economists call this utility maximisation. Utility maximisation is most obvious in highly price sensitive markets such as India, China and Mongolia (photo below shows privately operated public phone kiosk in Ulaan Bataar) but in the study of communication habits, you can find it in any part of the globe.

We found a subtler form of this behaviour in a study of public call offices (PCOs) and STD booths in India. A STD shop (photo below) is often made up of a couple of phones on the counter, with additional phone booths somewhere inside the establishment. The phone booths offer a higher degree of privacy and some form of seating yet in many cases customers opt to use the phones on the counter. Why? They are opting for convenience over privacy. Their conversations can be overheard, the noise from the street will flow into the conversation but it simply doesn't matter compared to the money that can be saved.

Lessons? Owning a device is not the same as use; carrying a device is not the same as understanding what it does; carrying a device will not necessarily lead to use; and when use occurs it will not necessarily be what you expect it to be. When a mobile phone is primarily used as a phone book to facilitate kiosk phone calls, how does this change the way the product should be designed?

And who are the dumb people in this equation? We are if we assume that people will not try to make the most of what they've got.

Writing from Tokyo | January 15, 2006 | Permalink