99% Invisible - 99pi Presents The Next Billion Users

Episode Date: October 24, 2020

This bonus episode is sponsored by Google’s Next Billion User Initiative. Every week millions of people come online for the very first time. And everyone – no matter where they live, what language they speak or their level of digital literacy – deserves an internet that was made for them. Google's Next Billion Users initiative conducts research and builds products for everyone, everywhere. Find out more at NextBillionUsers.google

Every week millions of people come online for the very first time and everyone, no matter where they live, what language they speak, or their level of digital literacy deserves an internet that was made for them. Google's Next Billion Users Initiative conducts research and builds products for everyone everywhere. Visit nextbillionusers.google to hear their stories. What follows is a story I produced at the behest of Google's next billion users initiative. They paid me to make it, but I still followed my own interests and talked to who I wanted

to, and produced the episode to be valuable and relevant to people interested in design. I actually really like the result, but they did pay me, and I want you to know that, because it matters. This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. We started with a typewriter. A mechanical key was struck. The type lever was pushed down. The type bar that corresponded to the key that was pressed rose up and slammed onto the ink ribbon in front of a piece of paper.

It was all very kinetic and satisfying. But there was a problem. With old typewriters, if he typed too fast, the typebars that were close together could crash into each other. So a man named Christopher Letham Sholes created a hack. Instead of all the letters being in an intuitive alphabetical order, he separated common pairs of keys and scattered them across the keyboard so their type bars wouldn't jam. The first six letters across the top row of Sholes typewriter for Q, W, E, R, T, W. Quirty.

Type this gut so adept with this configuration that even when typewriter mechanics evolved way beyond the point of needing key separated, the layout stuck around. And then, define all adaptive logic completely the layout stuck around on the computer keyboard as well. Then we got so used to the Quarty keyboard as an input device. It stuck around on smartphones too, even though using a tiny digital keyboard is nothing any user experienced designer would design for smartphones if they were starting from scratch. But that's how evolution is. Unless there's overwhelming pressure to push us in a new direction, we stay on the same path.

The Quarty keyboard becomes less and less useful over time, but it hangs around until all of its drawbacks accumulate and it hits an obstacle so big, so powerful that it cannot be steamrolled by history or habit. It hits India. For Indic languages, and those are languages from India and the Indians of continent. There are so many diacritical marks and asenders and desenders. Typing on a keyboard like that, I'm sure there have been numerous PhDs written on redesigning Indian keyboards because guess what? None of them work. That is awesome. Baki. I'm a UX director at Google with the next billion

users team. The NBU initiative is on a mission. The majority of the growth for the internet is actually going to happen around the world, places outside of the United States, and outside of what we have known in the past as being the developed markets. Those are terms that I'm not personally fond of. The idea of the growth being around the world,

we have to understand people around the world. And so this team is really based on understanding people around the world and their needs as they come online and developing experiences specifically for them. There is no one single NBU user. I mean, it's right there in the name. There's a billion of them. But they're also spread across the globe and different technology

has reached them at different rates, which creates a problem. Because just like the Quirty Keyboard, technology is built on the carcasses of older technology. And if the next Billions user has no experience with the last older technology, the leap to a new device involves getting across a wider and wider chasm. A lot of the metaphors that we're used to are ones that are deeply ingrained from us in us because of what we'veasy of the ecstasy of the ecstasy of the ecstasy of the ecstasy of the ecstasy of the ecstasy of the ecstasy of the ecstasy of the ecstasy of the ecstasy of the ecstasy of the ecstasy of the ecstasy of the ecstasy of the ecstasy of the ecstasy of the ecstasy of the ecstasy of the ecstasy of the ecstasy of the ecstasy of the ecstasy of the ecstasy of the ecstasy of the ecstasy of the ecstasy of the ecstasy of the ecstasy of the ecstasy of the ecstasy of the ecstasy of the ecstasy of the ecstasy of the ecstasy of the ecstasy of the ecstasy of the ecstasy of the ecstasy of the ecstasy of the ecstasy of the ecstasy of the ecstasy of the ecstasy of the ecstasy of the ecstasy of the ecstasy of the ecstasy of the ecstasy of the ecstasy of the ecstasy of the ecstasy of the ecstasy of the ecstasy of the ecstasy of the ecstasy of the ecstasy of the ecstasy of the ecstasy of the ecstasy of the ecstasy of the ecstasy of the ecstasy of the ecstasy of the ecstasy of the ecstasy of the ecstasy of the ecstasy of the ecstasy of the ecstasy of the ecstasy of the ecstasy of the ecstasy of the ecstasy of the ecstasy of the ecstasy of the ecstasy of the ecstasy of the ecstasy of the ecstasy of the ecstasy of the ecstasy of the ecstasy of the ecstasy of the ecstasy of the ecstasy of right? It's not the same as floating a page. Even actions that are thoughtfully considered specifically for a smartphone can be a challenge for a new user.

Take as a hypothetical example, Claudia from Mexico City. Or even a town outside of Mexico City. Okay, Claudia from Deluca. She's new to the internet, and she's coming online for the first time, or even just has seen technology. It's been around her.

She's had friends or relatives that have used that technology. And she's always felt a little bit of anxiety, of this is not for me. And this is something that coming to like Google doesn't want because make no mistake. They want Claudia as a customer, and making products and experiences that don't struts her out is a key to this.

If they lose her now, they may lose her forever. But yet she pushes herself and she either starts using a friend's phone or using her spouse's phone or using, you know, maybe even her son's phone. Just to start experimenting. The types of the problems that she runs into are numerous. She picks up the phone for the first time. What does it mean to unlock a phone? I mean, it doesn't have a key. She's seeing people swipe, so she tries swiping.

And so you start swiping in every direction, because that's just the way to exit phones. Wiping tapping. It looks great, but it doesn't mean anything. So these metaphors that you and I have come to appreciate and understand, because of the fact that we've learned through trial and error, but still have that implicit confidence, she doesn't have that confidence.

To complicate matters further, the ways she needs to use this phone may not be the ones anticipated by the people designing for the first-boying users. And so she swipes right because she's told to. It unlocks the phone or whatever it might be, swipes up been types in the password because many of these phones are actually locked. Because they're multi-user devices, people are using multiple people are using the same device. And this is just to get to the point of getting the phone unlocked. After this, she has to contend with all the individual apps that may have been loaded

on there by anyone of the multiple users of the phone. And it just gets exponentially more complicated and unpredictable from there. That's not to say that there aren't some designs that just work, no matter who is using them. Let's look at Google Maps, right? And photos to a certain extent, pinching and zooming, it's one of those things that you see two-year-olds doing on devices. And because of that, you realize the intuition is deep. The thing about it is that you see two-year-olds doing on devices, and because of that, you realize the intuition is deep. The thing about it is that you're grabbing on to something and you're pulling out,

or you're pushing on something and you're pushing it away. That's just a very thoughtful gesture, which I'm extremely appreciative of. I don't know who came up with it. But overall, there are very few user-experienced designs like Pinging and Zooming that seem to transcend age and cultural boundaries. So the work of ASIF and the NBU Initiative is to design things on a foundation of empirical research.

It starts with talking, asking questions, and living around the people they're designing for. The key is to listen. We're walking down the streets of Bangalore doing small, medium business research for a payments product we were working on. And one of the product matters I was with looked at the general experience and was trying to summarize over the course

of the interviews we had done for the day and said, we need to digitize their ledger. He noted rightfully, correctly, that at the end of the day, the merchant would sit down with his notebook and do some math and have to go through the entire inventory and make sure he understood where she understood this is exactly how much has gone out of the store, this is how much I've made and so

on. And for us digitizing is such an easy way to think about how we can add value because we know how to digitize, we know how to create the UI for it, we know how to store that data and to bring it back. We know how to do all the computation. But when they came back with the ideas to help these merchants with their business, they got an unexpected response. They pooped it. They said, I have no problem with the way that I currently do things.

It takes me five minutes at the end of the day. And in reality, this wasn't a problem that needed solving, is it? On a small enough business where two things go out and two things come in, I know I need to order one and I should be good to go. It's not to say that a ledger software, there are actually many in India and beyond where we study small businesses that had succeeded. It's not to say that a ledger piece of software won't succeed. It's just that the Google team's common inclination towards making things computerized was not necessarily the right answer.

Because it removes the simplicity and beauty from the way that people actually approach their day-to-day tasks. There's more to the story after this. The majority of people using the internet for the first time do so on mobile, not on a computer. They often share devices with family and friends, and they prefer voice and visuals over typing and reading. It's insights like these that help Google build more helpful and inclusive products.

Visit nextbillionusers.google to explore the research. The deplorable anti-Semite Henry Ford said, if I asked people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse. It's an anecdote to demonstrate Ford's genius, and it does make some sense. If you ask people who have no concept of an automobile, they will tell you that they want a faster horse. But what they often don't tell you is that they don't want a horse at all. They do not want to be more productive.

They want to play games, chat with friends, and flirt. They're willing to give up their meals. They're willing to work three shifts in like work morning, noon, and night just so they can get this extra data so they can like chat some girl. This is Paiyalla Aurora. I'm a professor at Arasmus University of Rotterdam.

I'm a digital anthropologist and I've authored a number of books. The reason one being the next billion users. Even though her book and expertise is also about the next billion users, she does not work for Google. Over the 10 years of researching users coming online in India, Brazil, and countries in Africa, Payal has had first-hand experience with companies and agencies introducing technology with the notion that it will be adopted by people in poorer countries to make themselves more productive, to get themselves out of poverty, in short, to make their lives better.

But over and over again, people all over the globe have shown that the way that they want to make their lives better is through pleasure and leisure. The first project she was involved with was in Bangalore in the early 2000s. So there were these stations, like it looks like an ATM, but it was really an ATM for information, for, you know, really an ATM for information, for women to check healthcare information, for farmers to check crop prices so they can be more competitive, churn could

learn and supplement the English skills because that was the pathway to mobility. And there was stationed on all these different places. And in what was basically the only restaurant, they had a screen where information would just flow nonstop, a ticker tape of regional weather data and useful information. And we had these little vans where we would take technologies to all these further corners of the villagers and convince people that, hey, guess what, there is something called the internet and it's amazing. And you're going to love it.

And you should check it out. And there's these community information centers, which you should go to, which is in the town, right? Six months down the line, people started calling us, oh, great, there's a movie band coming because the factors that we wanted to get villagers to get excited about something that they had never heard of. So we

promised to show them Hollywood, which is the body of the South movie. So they would get dressed up and they would all like, oh evening show there's some van that comes and shows us a movie and then interrupts us with some weird technology stuff, right? And then we can go resume and watch the movie again. And it became extraordinary popular. In fact,

I would say that's our legacy is that we were the movie bands. And you know, whenever we show them the internet, they're like, okay, toilet break, you know, the interval, off we go. And it was extraordinary boring for them. And it's not that it was not useful information. It was actually very important information. A lot of it was centered on providing crop prices to farmers. But the farmers had no illusions

that having this information would actually solve their problems. This is something I have heard again and again in many different contexts. Is that they'll listen. The system is fixed. It's like, you can tell me what the prices are in the city. Firstly, I'm not an idiot.

I know I'm selling at bay below market price. I just don't have a dumb choice, okay? Because of the poor infrastructures and the delivery mechanisms, they know I can't afford to go back to my farm. So the goods have to be sold and there's a fixed price and they know there's a farmer supply and we have to sell regardless of what you think is information deficit. So we actually designed an entire program based on a condescending worldview that it was basically the information deficit of these farmers that led to their poverty and if only we

could introduce the right information they would progress right. It was the same story for women's health care information. Here's health care information you know about how you could have less children you're like sure I can have less children not You're like, sure, I can have less children, not that I don't know that I can wear contraceptives. There's a question, will my husband wear it? And have I produced a son as yet? If not, I better keep producing those babies until I get a boy, right?

So much of it was social, cultural, and situational, but one thing was consistent. What is completely resonant across demographics, across caste systems, was their love for being entertained, because it does get boring. You have a lot of downtime. You know, if you're not farming, and you need some form of entertainment,

and we became extra-n became extraordinary popular because these 8 hems of information became gaming kiosks. Kids just loved it. They were like using it as a gaming station and a lot of these community information centers became friendship cafes. Just the fact that they were you know reframed in the imagination of these users showcase that these were re-framed in the imagination of these users, showcased that these were the real actual needs that were being met. And not the ones we believe they needed. These kinds of disastrous results that came from not understanding the needs of the users

is what led to projects like the NBU Initiative at Google, whose offices are embedded in the countries where they can spend time in the homes of the people they're trying to serve, and they can experience their needs and anxieties first hand. And one of the benefits of this intense research focus on one group with specific needs is that when you design things for the most extreme use cases,

you can end up making things better for everyone. Here's Aza Bakia again. People in next-planned user countries sometimes have phones that are not the latest models. They're not the fastest processors. One of the problems that we found early on severely impacted their experience was a lack of storage under device. And this is something that for us, it's like, yeah,

OK, I can find, delete a few files. But? But in actuality for them, it was a lot more, because that anxiety that's produced by what is caused by a lack of storage on their device is untenable. Because of the lack of storage, which they don't attribute to lack of storage, and because they don't have the deep knowledge of how these devices work, start freezing their phone, start slowing down applications, prevent them from receiving pictures of their loved ones, prevent them from sharing music that they care about. So many things are just not happening

because of storage on their device. So if the devices are not designed in such a way that the user with limited experience can deal with their storage problem, they seek help elsewhere. And that help may not be on the level. They go back to the mobile phone shop where they bought their phone and they ask for help. And we've seen instances where these mobile shop owners will take the phone and put it to the side,

and bite them back after an hour and say, here's your phone back, and charge them the 40 rupees that it costs to update their phone. We've seen instances where they're just forced and reset the entire device, and people lose their information, they lose everything on it, but devices are obviously performed better again. This loss can be particularly devastating when your relationship with your data on the cloud is different from how we've been trained in the last few years. For example, if they want to have some photographs, they will even pay to have a professional photographer, take the full family photograph, and then they keep that. So they use it as if they're printing it out. So the

weird thing is a digital copy on a mobile phone is really like a print for them. They formally dress up and they don't look at it as disposable transient. So they hold onto certain things which really make a give meaning. This tension that the next Boeing users felt about managing storage on old phones led Google to launch a product called Files to help people manage and free up space. And some of the early countries where we saw immense uptake, Italy, the United States, right? And so this is where a product that was built for India and Brazil in terms of the

qualitative research having been done in those two countries took off all over the world. But fundamentally at a human level, we all have problems. We want to optimize our devices. We want to be able to make our devices better so that we can enjoy ourselves more. This is the same principle of universal design that is touted when we put in curb cuts for people in wheelchairs and notice that it also benefits able-bodied people pushing strollers or really anyone navigating the city. And this is a benefit to be sure. Designing for people with extreme use cases creates products that can be easier to use,

more simple, and have greater utility for everyone. However, designing for people with different needs than those already online has inherent moral value, meeting people where they are and serving them is enough of a virtue in and of itself. But it is so valuable to have someone new come in, look at the way things are with fresh eyes and different challenges, and really question

how we got to know. Just like the tiny digital critical board we kept relying on for our smartphones, fresh eyes and different challenges, and really question how we got to know. Just like the tiny digital critical board we kept relying on for our smartphones, many things probably already sucked for the first billion users, but like a frog being boiled as someone slowly turns up the heat, we just didn't notice or got used to it. That is until the next billion users gets in the pot with us and asks, Why is this water so hot? This special episode of 99% of Asible was produced by me, Roman Mars, with music by Sean Raell. You can find all kinds of other stories on our website, 99pi.org.

Building the helpful and inclusive products is a global effort. Google is working to expand access to information and build products that help people unlock economic opportunity around the world. And they're inviting tech builders to use their development and design tools to create more inclusive products. Visit nextbillionusers.google to explore the tools. more inclusive products. Visit nextbillionusers.google to explore the tools.