The "Deep Digital Divide" - Can Design Bridge it?

Prathima Inolu at UXDX Community: Bridge the Digital Gap and Reconsider Classical Learnings. Video: https://youtu.be/Sn3xLcvOx3Y

Readable transcript: edited from the recording's captions for readability (fillers and false starts removed, punctuation and section headings added). Wording is the speaker's own. Timestamps are positions in the video. Names marked [?] could not be verified against the audio.

What the digital divide really is

[00:00:00] Hi everyone, welcome to the UXDX presentation. The topic that I would like to speak about today is the digital divide, and let's dig in deep. The topic is "The Deep Digital Divide: Can Design Bridge It?" By the way, I'm Prathima Inolu. I'm the chief designer and co-founder of Divami Design Labs. We are from India and we primarily focus on SaaS platforms and deep tech, health tech, fintech platforms. We design and do front-end development for these. Now, without delay, let's dig in.

[00:00:43] The digital divide. I'm sure a lot of you would have heard the word digital divide, and most of you would know what it is. Generally the understanding of digital divide is limited to not having access to internet, or not having access to devices like smartphones, tablets and computers. Let's go a little bit beyond this. But are all the people having access to internet and having access to smartphones, computers, tablets actually using the internet like they can, or they should, probably, for saving time, for convenience and saving money? Is it really happening? Probably not.

[00:01:40] There are a lot of people out there in the world who still have access to internet, who have access to smartphones or tablets, but they hardly use it. The primary focus for them is primarily to use it for communication with probably their families, or for entertainment. Now, should we consider these people as part of the segment where they're divided digitally? Probably yes, because probably they're not divided by hardware or internet access, but they definitely are divided in terms of user experience and how they consume information or use internet or the devices.

Decoding the divide

[00:02:27] Now let's just decode the divide a little bit more. Why is the digital divide there in terms of usage? Is it because of lack of digital literacy? I think that is one of the major reasons as of today, that a lot of people out there do not use their smartphones, laptops or the tablets as they probably could. Why? There is a lot of fear, a lot of discomfort among people to be using these devices, for many reasons. They are not yet comfortable with it, or we as designers have not yet made them comfortable using all these applications that exist out there.

[00:03:17] Fear in turn boils down to not having trust. And why don't they trust? They do not probably trust using the smartphones or the digital world yet, probably because they still think the old ways are the better ways, they still prefer the traditional ways. Is it because the digital platforms are not enabling them? Probably they are, but maybe we are not yet showing the value to them, we are not yet making them comfortable on these applications.

[00:03:58] One of the key reasons a lot of people gave when we did talk to them, as to why they are not yet comfortable using applications for paying, or applications for their work, they clearly said that they actually are not comfortable using them because they don't know how to use them. The apps are not yet made for them. This is one of the key reasons. They said that they would rather do things the traditional way because, while some of them see value, they don't yet know how to use them. So the apps have not been built for them is one of the key reasons that a lot of people did mention.

[00:04:46] Apart from that, what other things could be the reasons? The physical age, definitely, and also having limited exposure, which in turn is that we are not actually stepping into their world to help them out, to make them comfortable in the digital world.

The factors behind the divide

[00:05:08] So if we have to dig a little more deeper into the factors that are impacting the divide: one is demographics, geographics. We probably are not understanding the complete needs and pain points. Apart from that there are a few more things that definitely add a lot of value, which is the psychometrics part of it. We necessarily are not understanding them as to what their requirements are. What is their day like? When do they feel comfortable using the smartphone?

[00:05:47] Somebody is comfortable probably using it for communication. I've seen a lot of them do video calls. They are very comfortable with messaging, probably because even when the smartphones didn't exist, the traditional small phones without the internet access still had SMS, and they were still able to message, and they find it still comfortable to be messaging. So probably adaption to any applications related to messaging, like WhatsApp and stuff, they're easily able to adapt to it.

[00:06:18] The video calling, they're very comfortable, probably because it was an extension of their usual calling, and they love to see their loved ones over the video rather than just speak to them on call. So probably that's where they were able to adapt to those kinds of applications quite easily.

[00:06:41] But when it comes to other applications, especially where the money is involved, like the bank applications, the trust factor is not there. It is not only because they have limited access to the machines, but also that they have faced certain issues, or they hear a lot of things happening around the world where people lost their money, people were asked to share their passwords and they did and they lost their money. So there are a lot of things involved. So our past experiences, or the information that we carry along with us, definitely defines our usage patterns.

[00:07:19] So we absolutely have to focus on the psychometrics. We need to understand where they are from, what their experiences are, how they lead their day, what makes them anxious, what makes them happy, what makes them comfortable. These are the things that we definitely need to understand.

[00:07:37] Along with it, formographics. This is something we definitely have to focus on, especially when we are designing applications that they can use at work. I'll dig in a little more into it a little later, but for the working population, especially the blue collared employees, we need to figure out how to make them comfortable by enabling them, empowering them with the digital applications.

[00:08:10] Market influence, of course. The market influence is always there. It is all about what the world is doing around them, and if we are able to help them, guide them in the right manner and show them the value of using the digital applications, I think that adoption would be a lot faster.

Who is on the other side of the divide

[00:08:30] So who are the main people, or the personas, that are impacted by the divide, or part of this big division? People who are tech savvy, who are very comfortable using applications, and there are people who are not at all comfortable using the applications.

[00:08:50] Senior citizens. Again, this is not a generalization, but having said that, holistically, when you observe, irrespective of their geography, whether they come from, whether they are in the US, or whether they are in India, or Thailand, senior citizens have not used digital devices for a very long time. They started adopting them only about 10, 15 years ago. So they necessarily have not been using them all their life. It is only after the middle age, or a little after their 50s and 60s, that they started using them, and they find it extremely hard to interact with the digital devices. The reason being, a device at the end of the day does not personify a person. They're more comfortable talking to people, getting work done through people rather than through devices.

[00:09:58] Blue collared workers, this is a classic example. Usually, yes, their educational background does impact. Again, there are always exceptions. There are highly educated people who are also blue collared employees. But having said that, they come from an educational background where they're not necessarily introduced to technology earlier, and also they do not have access to a lot of things. And the work that they do, necessarily people have not focused, at least the digital world has not focused, on them in the last 10, 15 years.

[00:10:44] It is only now that the world is shifting, where we are talking about including everyone into this digital space and how do we make everyone's life easy. During the initial years of the boom of the digital technologies, the boom of internet, we highly focused on people who were tech savvy, people who had absolutely access to computers, gadgets, and enabled them and empowered them. But now things are changing, and pretty soon I think we will be there, where we would be able to include everybody around the world.

[00:11:28] Homemakers, absolutely. I don't have to speak probably about their financial background. And underdeveloped countries to begin with: having access to these gadgets itself is limited in underdeveloped countries, not everywhere, but yes. Now, if you see the penetration of smartphones in third world countries, it's much faster than actually in the US. So there are reports which show either way. But then, definitely, in underdeveloped countries people still are not tech savvy, or they're not comfortable using technology yet.

How do we bridge the divide?

[00:12:15] So how do we build this gap? How do we bridge this divide? It is extremely important for us to win the trust of people. It is extremely important to make them comfortable on the applications, the digital applications. It is extremely important to make people feel like the app is made for them.

[00:12:45] For that reason we actually have to understand all of these people. We need to understand what bothers them, what doesn't bother them. Most of them, because they may not come from a rich educational background, it is very important for us to not bombard them with a lot of information. We need to adapt to visualizations. People usually are very comfortable with visualizations than an overload of information. So we have to figure out how to reduce this cognitive overload. Make them feel comfortable. Give them guided flows. Help them easily discover things. These are very, very, very crucial to bridge this gap.

[00:13:37] Now, the time to perform a task. Actually, about a few days back I was listening to this conversation where people were saying that people these days, at least the attention span of people, has gone down, irrespective of technology or non-technology. It's just that the penetration of television, the penetration of a lot of things. We're not as peaceful as we used to be, probably. But the study shows that people's focus is less than 8.3 seconds. I believe a goldfish's focus is about 9 seconds. I was reading this somewhere, and we have gone down to that level.

[00:14:28] So what they say is: focus, give clarity on what they are here to do. Then help them perform the action and show them the output. Be simple, be clear in what is expected. Just do it, and help them move away from it. So the time to task is extremely, extremely important, while at the same time keeping them engaged all along.

Contextualization, consistency and emotion

[00:14:59] Contextualization. Usually, at any given point, when we are reading something or when we are performing an action, from there each of us as humans would have multiple questions for which we would probably need answers, or our journeys are different, and the chances of them being different are extremely high. So we definitely have to understand from here, where would they go from here, and include those possible actions everywhere. And that is what we are calling contextualization.

[00:15:34] Inclusion and consistency. When we are designing an application, we absolutely have to make sure the application, while it is inclusive in its nature, it also is consistent across, to avoid surprises. When the patterns are repeating, when we are trying to do the same thing, the familiarity makes people comfortable. It builds the trust of the people and they hang in there to finish their work.

[00:16:03] Emotional innovation. Usually when we are designing, we usually think of demographics, geographics, what are the needs and what are their pain points. But often we keep their emotions in check. And this is a classic example I try to give everywhere, which is Uber. When somebody is using an Uber, they could either be going to celebrate something, or they could be going to an emergency or to a hospital. So Uber, while performing the workflow of Uber, has to consider all kinds of emotions. It has to consider that people could be trying to book a cab in any kind of emotion.

[00:16:56] So we need to make sure that we are handling all kinds of emotions fairly well. We need to make people comfortable if the cab is getting delayed. We need to figure out how to use the tone, the tone of the application, what language we are using. We should be extremely careful what visualizations we are using. So for example, if somebody is in an emergency and they're trying to book a cab and they found a cab, it can't be like "hooray, you found a cab." It just doesn't work. At the same time, if somebody is going somewhere to celebrate, we can't use a normal tone. So you need to find a good balance, and for that we absolutely, absolutely have to consider the emotions of the people, the emotional state of the people, not just their user needs and the pain points.

[00:17:47] Along with it, intellectual innovation is also equally important. What I mean by that is, we as humans, we shift between emotional space to intellectual space. When we are in intellectual space, we are trying to perform a task, finish a task. When we are in an emotional state, our logic kind of degrades in a sense. So we need to figure out how to balance both the intellectual persona part of it as well as the emotions of the users.

[00:18:21] Education, value delivery. We did discuss this: trust, security, trust. At the end of the day our applications have to be designed in such a way that we win the trust of the person, and we definitely have to keep them in mind while we are trying to win their trust. And the voice for accessibility is also extremely crucial. So one of the key things that I believe could make a huge difference to bridge this divide is voice enablement, and support all the possible languages, because not all people are comfortable with English and not all people are comfortable writing and typing. So if we could enable voice, I think we will be able to take it to the next level.

Case study: the manufacturing floor

[00:19:10] I'll just take a simple case study. In fact we have been working on a couple of projects. One is in the manufacturing industry. We have been working with a SaaS platform where we have been helping them. The USP of the platform is to provide analytics as well as the workflow management on the floor for the manufacturing industry. So what is required here is, how do we increase the growth of the manufacturing lines, and how do we increase the efficiency, and how do we make people more efficient?

[00:19:54] But even to do that we need to be able to track every detail, and in order to track every detail we need the employees. In most of the manufacturing industries they are blue collared employees and they are not tech savvy. They do not like using digital applications. They do not like using the phones or the tablets. They prefer still pen and paper. They prefer writing everything.

[00:20:30] But because of that there is a lot of gap in terms of growth, because at the end of the day in a manufacturing unit there are only certain lines there, and you can grow only by increasing the efficiency of these lines. When I say line, it is the manufacturing, for example, of a bolt. There are certain steps, it's a sequence of seven steps, and in the sequence of seven steps you have to use that line. Only by making processes efficient is the only way we can increase the growth and efficiency, and in turn the revenue, of the manufacturing industry, or of that particular company.

[00:21:12] So what did we do there? We went with a very unique approach where we tried giving them instant gratification, and we actually made the digital application for these blue collared employees so simple, so easy to use, that it was just a set of five questions or ten questions where they have to just touch and touch and touch and it is done. Nowhere did we use forms, nowhere did we use a lot of information, nowhere did we use a lot of input taking, and pretty much anywhere they needed help, we gave them the guided flows. It was like one step, click, second step, click, third step, click, boom, you're done, and that's it.

[00:21:58] So they found that this is a lot easier than using the old pen and paper way and submitting the paper, and if it is lost. So they understand the value of it and they really appreciated it. So minimalistic design and the simple workflows paid off in this particular case, and the guided flows: we never showed all the information in one shot, we were taking them step by step, and that absolutely helped.

[00:22:29] The UI designs also helped, because it was for the manufacturing industry in India and especially for blue collar employees, the culture of India mattered there. So we used very bright colors to make them feel at home. We also used local languages wherever applicable, for help as well as for the labels and stuff, and the visualizations were all Indian, the infographics that we used were all Indian-based, so they felt comfortable being on the application.

[00:23:09] I think, Rory, I finished it in time. Thank you guys.

Q&A

[00:23:18] Rory: Excellent, thank you very much for that talk. I really, really enjoyed it. There is always sometimes when you're working in tech, you just kind of forget that there are other people who aren't as used to it and digital native, as we say.

[00:23:33] Prathima: Yes. Yeah, yeah.

[00:23:35] Rory: Excellent. So if anybody has any questions, please do post them either on the chat on UXDX or on YouTube, LinkedIn, whichever platform you're watching on, and we'll put those questions through to Prathima. But I'm going to start off with a question that I always kind of struggle with, and just wondering on your context or your opinion on it. When you make it super simple, as you were describing, and there's a reason for that, it is to make it very easy for people to use. There's sometimes a balance between, let's say, a power user, and you're slowing them down, somebody who really knows how to use it. How do you get that balance between making it easy for the people who aren't very savvy but also enabling somebody who is savvy, not frustrating them with going too slow?

[00:24:26] Prathima: Rory, so first of all we need to create personas. We need to understand the difference. The SaaS platform that I was talking about, it is being used in a manufacturing industry, and in the manufacturing industry there is an employee on the line trying to check the quality of each and every nut, and there are employees who are trying to separate all the bolts and nuts, for example. And then they have a supervisor on top of them, then the supervisor has a manager. The supervisor is typically responsible for one or more lines of manufacturing. The supervisor reports to a manager who is responsible for a floor, and so on and on, right till the CXO level.

[00:25:16] Prathima: So when we are designing we have to understand what exactly do they want on this application. Be precise, to the point. Now the person who is on the line and trying to do their work, they are only interested in finishing their work. And they want to click and say, hey, I'm done with my work, everything looks good, or, hey, I found a small issue here, report the issue and put that bolt away, probably. So all they need is that.

[00:25:46] Prathima: Whereas the supervisor, he needs to understand what is the efficiency of each person on this line. If there are seven steps, there are seven people on this line, he needs to understand, are all of them performing efficiently? They also need some amount of analytics where they can compare who is slow, who is fast, what can I do. Apart from people information, he also needs to understand what could be the possible repairs that are coming up on this line, the machines, they need to maintain the machines, when is the downtime coming up. Whereas the floor manager is answerable for what is the productivity on the floor for a week, or so on.

[00:26:27] Prathima: When we consider all of them, the design for the supervisor definitely is not going to be click, click, click. In fact it needs drill downs into the graphs. He needs to understand, but not as much, because he's also probably only just finished his, not even undergraduation, probably just schooling, and there's only so much he can absorb. So we need to literally make it very clear to him, draw conclusions for him, state that, and only give him additional information on demand. So you can say, hey, today the performance of three people is down from the usual efficiency, do you want to know why? Click on it, and then show the details to him. So on demand is one way of solving that problem.

[00:27:15] Prathima: And if you go to the CXO level, they are interested in what is the revenue I'm making this month, can I meet my numbers. So that's at a different volume. So personas matter, what they need on the application matters. Sometimes you need to give them information, but probably on demand, and then give them a guided flow to take them where they want to go.

[00:27:38] Rory: Great, thank you. I just noticed there were some questions coming in there. So Dia has asked about balancing the advanced and basic users, which I think you answered, as well as how you identify the personas. So you could do a very role-based identification there. But what I might do, we're out of time now, but what I'll do is I'll just copy and paste those questions in, because we have another one from Ouel[?] as well. I'll paste those into the UXDX Slack group and I'll invite Prathima to come and answer those questions there. So thank you very much, Prathima, for sharing your insights.

[00:28:15] Prathima: Thank you. Thanks.