Designing for emerging markets

Earlier this year, I started a new role as a Product Designer at JANA. The company builds Android apps to try and make the internet more accessible to users in the developing world. These users are typically on prepaid phone plans where the cost of data is actually more expensive than the device itself. The company has leveraged partnerships with advertisers willing to pay a portion of users’ prepaid phone bills in exchange for ad space within our apps. And there’s a large scale to our audience as well.

Designing for a huge userbase like this has its own challenges and has forced me to approach design differently. The biggest mindset shift is to see things as a user in a developing nation, as opposed to looking at it as a tech-savvy user in Boston. Simply because I can’t picture myself using the feature doesn’t render the product useless. As an example, one of our product specs called for adding a “power” button somewhere in the app, which when tapped simply closes the app. At first glance, this seemed silly and wasteful because users can already close apps using the app switcher. But market research showed us that this is a common design convention in other similar apps in the country, and our data showed that hundreds of thousands were actively tapping that button to close out of the app. So we kept it. We even validated this in actual in-market user tests. Users said that this is how they were used to doing it, so they would simply look for the power button to close the app. This is just one of many examples where my initial assumptions had to be thrown out the window in order to see things from a different perspective.

This has also forced me to look at the design decisions that other companies make differently. For instance, it’s been easy to ridicule Facebook lately for their insistence on pushing the Stories feature to all their products — from the core Facebook app to Messenger to Instagram and potentially even WhatsApp. But simply because none of your friends in your tiny network in New York City aren’t using these features doesn’t mean every user isn’t using it. Stories is wildly popular in emerging markets. There are countries like Brazil, Mexico, and India where Snapchat hasn’t really caught on, so for a lot of users, it’s their very first exposure to posting shortform video clips and images that disappear in twenty four hours. Facebook’s goal is to get these users to get onboard with the Stories experience before Snapchat steals the booming market share here. It makes total business sense from their perspective.

I also can’t stress the importance of in-market research when designing for emerging markets. In the US, it’s tempting to treat emerging markets akin to “rest of world”, i.e., all the other nations that aren’t the US or most countries in Europe. But the truth is, each country is vastly different in its familiarity with mobile technology which in turn impacts what they expect it to do. There’s even tons of subcultures within each country that impacts how audiences view it. For example, in India, celebrity endorsement in apps is a huge thing. A big Bollywood star or comedian personally endorsing the product for its values goes a long way in user acquisition and retention. Users tend to associate the quality of the product with the celebrity and latch on to it. This specific instance is true through the entire country, which is a great insight. And we would’ve never truly grasped the importance of this had we never traveled to India and talked to our users about it.

Each subculture has its own nuances when it comes to a larger market of apps. I also had the chance to do some intensive research around selfie apps in different countries as a result of talking to such a diverse population of users. In Japan, selfie apps focus on emotive characters and self-expression, which is unsurprising coming from the country that gave us emoji and popularized anime and manga. In Chine, selfie apps focus primarily on manipulating physiological and biological human features, where the beauty standards of the west are heavily influencing the population coming of age. Likewise in India, the apps focus on lightening the skin complexion and modifying the “fairness” of the skin, again influenced by western culture. I could probably write an entire blog post on how selfie apps are a fantastic example of differential beauty standards across cultures with the information I now know, but the point is that it’s insights like this which tell us a lot about what the population cares about and how their decisions are affected by the things they choose to care about. And of course, their expectations of other apps are driven primarily by what these popular apps can and can’t do — everything from cross-platform app connections to simple UI conventions in design.

There are users I’ve talked to that didn’t even know they were using the internet, despite them having an active 3G data connection on their phone. They didn’t understand the difference between a web app and a native app (to be fair, neither do a lot of people in the US). There were users who didn’t know that there was an app store on their phone from where they could download more apps, so they just stuck to the default apps that the phone came preinstalled with. Designing for an audience like this has huge implications for design, as all desktop conventions that were ported to mobile for the sake of familiarity now need to be re-worked from scratch. Designing for people who don’t really know that they’re using the internet or that they are uploading and downloading data is quite something. There are generational differences at play here as well, where 18-year olds today have grown up with technology so embedded into their lives that they literally expect to speak into their phones to get anything done. The thirty to forty year olds know what a search bar or a URL is, but the younger ones have no idea and don’t care. They simply want everything to happen through voice. Again, we would have never known these things about our users if we hadn’t gone and talked to them in-person.

In the short five months that I’ve been here at my new role, I’ve worked on many features that literally nobody in the United States would ever think of or want to use but people in emerging markets are using an insane amount. It’s honestly humbling to be exposed to a whole different side of the world that uses technology very differently than we do. Designing for them is quite the challenge as well. There are complexities in running user tests with remote testing, the language barrier, and cultural differences. We can’t be in-market all the time. Users are very accustomed to apps trying to scam them for money or take advantage of their privacy and data, so we have to try twice as hard to appear trustworthy and safe.

As populations within emerging markets get online, they will start to trust technology more and more. But they won’t quite reach the market saturation that populations in the western world have hit. The middle class in emerging markets is absolutely huge. All of them have niche sub-markets that will be served by disruptors, most likely by people already in their own country. Being able to impact the growth of mobile in emerging markets in such a significant way is actually pretty cool. I hope I get to keep traveling and gain more earth-shattering insights about how users in different parts of the world use technology differently. There’s no way to describe the feeling of making an incredible prototype that you get showered with praise for by your peers in Boston, only to have users in the country you’re testing in tell you that it’s complete garbage and that they wouldn’t ever use it. This forces me to change the way that I think and approach design in such radical ways. Sometimes you ignore the feedback of people in the US because you know your audience better than they do. Sometimes you do intensive research about how other apps that people use impact their experience with your app. Sometimes you just hope that certain UI conventions are global and find out in testing that they aren’t. I like having my preconceived notions about users and human beings challenged, so this is actually quite an exciting place to be. Advertisers too, have realized that emerging markets are the place to be, with huge boosts in budgets for digital advertising in these markets. The future of emerging markets seems very exciting, and I’m thrilled to be on the ride to see how design impacts user behavior in these places.