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Hoops, Dreams (Micro Banking)
Do you remember your first time, your first ever email?
In 1992 or thereabouts I was sitting in a dusty office in the third floor of London Guildhall University - books, manuals and papers waiting to be graded piled up around me, staring at the green command line of a clunky desktop computer, a flashing cursor taunting a response if only I knew the hidden syntax. With a list of commands written on a scrap of paper and a single email address belonging to a colleague working out of another university I typed the message, typed 'send' and pressed return. The very idea of sending a message electronically to be received instantly was for me a revelation, an indicator of the revolution that was to follow. A pulse quickened.
I can hear you sighing - email is soooo last century, on a par with becoming teary-eyed about sending a telegram, steam ships or horse drawn buggies. Except that we all have an equivilent of my first email experience - whether its the instant frisson that came from your first IM exchange, the scary-fast thrill of making a purchase using Amazon one-click or simply seeing your Facebook network grow. Magic, proceeded by moments of tension and terror - what happens if I press the wrong button? Can I change things later if I don't like how it turns out? Who are these people? What just happened? Until over time it becomes second nature - the technology just fades into the background and the cycle continues - today's cutting edge becoming tomorrow's standard.
We live in a world where technology, in its various guises is unevenly distributed - what is run of the mill to you is the new new thing to someone else, and no matter how where you are on the early adopter curve - there's always someone who is a few steps ahead. So it should be no surprise that something as simple as opening a saving's account can have the same impact - if, for example you're one of the hundreds of millions of people for whom banking is currently out of reach.
Reader's may be interested in Abhilasha a pilot study by New Delhi start up Eko and the Centurion Bank of Punjab that offers a no-frills interest earning saving account that be updated and managed through a mobile phone with sign-up and support provided by service representative neighbourhood/relationship officers. The service faces many challenges ranging from the cost of acquiring and servicing new customers, generating commercial revenue from servicing low income customer accounts; a lack of textual and technical literacy; and customer access to the human or technological network required to make the transfer.
The solution that Eko has adopted is to make use of a baseline mobile phone technology called Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD) to make transfers and check balances by dialing/typing in a string of characters. For example entering *543*190123456789*100*1133740274# and pressing the Call button (*short code*recipient's mobile number*amount*signature with PIN# with the PIN coming from a printed booklet issued to the account holder) would send 100 rupees to a particular account number. A video complete with natty soundtrack explains how it works here.
The UX people amongst you will have recoiled at the usability of a command line string - who, let alone an illiterate customer could possibly learn something so complex?
Service design is challenging but a number of factors stand in Eko's favour - the service leverages a known behaviour (dialing a long phone number) on a ubiquitously available technology (mobile phones) and only uses the most basic features of that technology (USSD/SMS). It also leverages a neighbourhood network of service representatives to sign up and assist (new) customers, which in turn supports what we term proximate usage - where it's not necessary to know how to do everything yourself if there's someone nearby who can take care of it for you. If you live in a country like the UK you're more likely to pay someone to help out, in India there's a higher likelihood and acceptance of turning to your extended network. Lastly, even if it means learning an arcane set of commands, it provides access to rudimentary banking where before there was none. For every feature, product or service: how is it discovered? what does it enable? how motivated is the user to learn? Yeah it could be simpler, but sometimes the most elegant solution is the one that is accessible to everyone and that works.
In the beginning was the command line. When the search engine is the primary interface and you start to go beyond the basics we've gone full circle.
Related: a video about designing for illiterate consumers; and consider the implication of providing an email account and 1GB of storage to the billion or so people who have never used email, but currently own a mobile phone.
Hello World.
Writing from Tokyo | December 8, 2008 | Permalink