March 09, 2006

Consumer Options

Four batteries for sale in China.

Covering a gamut of real consumer options: official Nokia; fake Nokia; premium non-Nokia - costs just below the official Nokia price but doesn't pretend to be official; and generic no-brand. Getting what you pay for? Getting what you perceive you pay for? Quality assurance? Risks?

Posted by Jan at 09:38 AM | Comments (3)

December 22, 2005

Unexpected Behaviours

Cycling in Chinese cities I was frequently surprised by electric bicyles - the driver seated often with feet resting on pedals, but not pedalling, nor the sound of a motor, yet faster, silently and effortlessly drifting by.

What makes a bicycle a bicycle? Or a motorbike a motorbike? At what point do objects outgrow their original names? To what extent are new features, or the way we use an object constrained by its legacy features, expectations of how it should be used?

Posted by Jan at 11:49 PM | Comments (0)

November 20, 2005

Non-Literate Mobile Phone Communication

To communicate with someone outside your immediate proximity requires at least 4 things: something to communicate; tools to create what you want to communicate; an infrastructure to carry the communication; and a means of identifying with whom to communicate. There are an estimated 799 million non-literate peoples world wide. If you can't read and write how do you manage your contacts?

This simple observation was the starting point to conduct a series of (ongoing) exploratory research studies in India, China and Nepal - our aim to understand the communication needs of non-literate users. For mobile phone manufacturers who wish to address these needs: How does the inability to read and write affect the ability of mobile phone users to make effective use of mobile phones? Making and receiving calls? Creating and managing contact information? Text messaging? Using time management features? How can we design communication tools that draw on the knowledge and experiences that these users do have?

If your interest is piqued then you might enjoy the following essay entitled Understanding Non-Literacy as a Barrier to Mobile Phone Communication which explores these issues and proposes a number of possible design solutions. As with a lot of our work the original projects included a fair amount of concept development that is only touched on in this essay.

In the studies we spent time with non-literate users exploring, mapping and understanding the things they used and the tasks they wanted to achieve - from using washing machines to weighing scales to running motorbikes to re-tuning TVs to paying for things. How did they interact with objects with textual and numeric interfaces? What problems did they encounter? What strategies did they adopt to overcome these problems? Were these strategies successful? If not, why not? And how can we bring the knowledge from this research and apply it to create communication devices that are more in tune with our non-literate users?

Researching non-literate communication practices has been rewarding: it touches on a very basic human desire - to communicate across time and space; the potential payback for the research is obvious and non-trivial; and the study participants, collaboration partners and environments in which the research took place have been quite simply inspiring.

Photos taken from street research in Mumbia, Bangalore, 2004 & 2005.

Posted by Jan at 01:42 PM | Comments (0)

July 02, 2005

Repair Culture China

The total cost of owning a product includes the risk it will break, and the cost and ease of repair if it does. Assuming it is out of warrantee, or that it even had a warrantee - grey market imports and used phones won't be covered. A feature of lower income consumers is that every yuan, rupee and cent counts - everything that helps the consumer shaves a few cents off the price will get mindshare.

Whilst in India Aditya pointed me into the direction of Delhi's thriving mobile phone sale and repair culture at Karol Bagh market, and with the help of colleagues been doing some follow up research here in JiLin. There are many shops clustered around Dong Shichang Market selling used mobile phones, and tucked into the back of most of these is a small repair counter typically staffed by the husband of the lady who owns the shop. Spent a little while exploring the user experience of getting a phone fixed through informal channels.

The choices for JiLin consumers with an out of warrantee product is to: buy a new phone (prohibitively for most people); go to the (official) Nokia Care shop; or take it to one of the repair guys. Of course to do this properly we needed a phone, broken. Bought a used Nokia 8850 for 250 RMB (18 Euro). The first shop we entered had a very friendly repair guy, who once he overcome his initial scepticism at our request and was happy to help out.

"I'd like you to break this phone display please"
"Um"
"But not smash it, more of a little crack"
"Er"
"And trash the speaker, as if its been dropped in the toilet"

He managed to disassemble, selectively break and then rebuild the phone in less than 5 minutes. And then out to the next shops to get it repaired...

Side note: Wishing I had bought The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid with me for a re-read but the hard back is just too bulky to lug everywhere. Reading a PDF on a laptop is about as enjoyable as waiting for XP to boot.

Posted by Jan at 11:11 AM | Comments (0)

June 20, 2005

Recycle

The second hand phone market in Ji Lin city is a history lesson in phone design, covering everything from the original brick-like Motorolas & Nokias to more recent 3G offerings.

This 8850, 2nd or 3rd hand, with non-Nokia battery but otherwise perfect working order - 250 Yuan (22 Euro). One happy new owner.

OS supports Malaysian so presume its a grey market import from there. Phone memory contains list of previous owners contacts. The volume of data & content stored on phones is growing. What will future shoppers discover on their 2nd hard purchases?

Posted by Jan at 02:11 PM | Comments (0)

June 07, 2005

Finding Rhythm

Running a user study in JiLin City. The plan is to meet the team at Beijing Terminal 1, though the redeye from Helsinki means a 3 hour stopover before the connecting flight. The only beds in the airport come with a massage, so book back to back sessions and doze. Take the opportunity to recharge various gadgets whilst she pummels my back.

Eventually the other team members arrive. We've travelled from 3 different research sites - Helsinki, Beijing and Tokyo. Inauspiscious start to the study - the connecting flight is cancelled so everyone shifts to alternatives.

Intensive research studies are a unique opportunity: 10 days for the team to gather, descend on a city to collect and synthesize as much data on our research topic as possible. The plan is to run 1 qualitative study and 2 quantitative studies simultainiously. Mission control is a hotel suite which over which is already looking like, um, mission control. We need all available wall space for hanging incoming data, so photo-frames with fetching floral scenes are removed and in one case replaced by a whiteboard. The rest of the space is controlled chaos - cameras charging, laptops buzzing, the printer churning out photos.

Understanding the city helps us put the study participant data into perspective. Every city has some kind of rhythm, and the first challenge for the team is to simultainiously synchronise time-zone challenged selves with the rhythm of the city. Anyone travelling long distance is encouraged to arrive in the timezone a few days early and take a couple of days vacation - everybody wins with this arrangement.

Three tips for getting to know a city quickly: buy a bicycle and use it to cover as much ground as possible; dismount and interact with as many research-topic relevant people as possible; go clubbing; find time to wake up when the city wakes up (typically not after a night's clubbing).

Posted by Jan at 10:36 AM | Comments (0)