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Functional, Spiritual, Aspirational Value

The photo above was taken by my design team colleague Zeenath Hasan during an exploratory study in Cairo. It shows the Al-Moazen (call to prayer) application described by its developers as “so simple yet very useful and handy application. It helps Muslims all over the world remember their prayers time”. Which makes for a nice enough localised-applications-for-different-parts-of-the-world story if it were true. Or more to the point, if it were the whole story.

It was one of the slides in last week's Adaptive Path presentation, I'll post the full material once its cleaned up.

That photo is a reminder to dig a little deeper. The fact is that anyone living in a city or neighbourhood with a large Muslim population knows the prayer times because the streets are filled the sounds of the adhan being recited from the mosques. In this context the functional value of knowing the prayer times through your mobile phone is close to zero. But that's not to say it doesn't have value

Well, firstly to acknowledge it has some value for people travelling to different time zones, but that doesn't explain its popularity.

The real value of this application is - using (or showing off) the Al-Moazen application in sight of others implies both a technological literacy and a certain level of devoutness. Religious extremism is a hot-potato topic in Egypt today and other peoples perception of your devoutness can be a non-trivial issue. Secondly the application is highly aspirational - it implies a intent to be more devout, and as such is similar to buying a new outfit for the gym that you never end up using or in my case buying this book. Lastly it is reassuring - that you know it's there should you need it. One of the underlying reasons why most people consider their mobile phone to be one of the essential objects when leaving home is because of this reason - its a great recovery tool should you need it.

Update: as reader Petri Aukia pointed out by email - it also serves as a functional tool for non-mulsims working in Saudi Arabia to understand whether there is enough time to schedule meetings and other activities around prayer times. It opens up interesting perspective on who are the perceived/real customers for this kind of application. I've turned comments back on if anyone else wants to weigh in.

As a side note to all this, there used to be a time zone offset bug on series 60 phones where someone changing the time zone on their not-quite-as-smart phone would be out by one hour. So that someone relying on the Al Moazen app for prayer times would also be off by one hour. The continuing reliance on technology indeed.

And the photo above? Taken from the same presentation - Zeenath conducting interviews during our recent Mumbai study.

Related: Mecca way finding redundancy in Tehran.

Writing from Tokyo | August 20, 2007 | Permalink