Voice based services

Technology penetration got a long way to go in countries like India. The PC penetration, High-speed internet connectivity, technology awareness are some of the major problems in rural/semi-urban India. I can say this with confidence because I was born and brought up in a town. Even today I don't see any change in the way small and medium businesses operate in my home town. They still use word-of-mouth method for marketing their product/services, maintain company accounts using manual notebooks (named chitta, kurippu, peredu in Tamil) and the whole supply chain is tracked manually.

In spite of the limitations mentioned above, telecom/mobile infrastructure is pretty strong in these rural areas. But the number of technology products/ventures focussed in India on leveraging such a strong infrastructure is very less. Most of the entrepreneurial ventures I have come across (at least in Bangalore) are mainly started by 'geeks' who believe that they can build a business with their 'cool' looking products. These 'cool' products cannot be marketed in countries like India, where the technology awareness is lacking big time.

In the lines of leveraging telecom/mobile infrastructure, I have come across some companies like Ubona. Their idea is to provide voice based services to get the local information (say nearby restaurants, hospitals, schools) by calling a pre-defined phone number. This comes free of cost for the consumers and service providers can build their brand by listing their firms with the voice service provider. In a way they are trying to adapt the model what Google has done with internet. I found this concept pretty interesting. Following are the reasons why such concepts will work in India:

1. The business model is built around transactions. By considering mass population of India, there is no problem with respect to number of transactions. The success of telecom service provides in India is a typical example for tapping power of transactions.
2. The rural consumer will not be able to pay for such services from his side. By making this as a free service, compelling reason can be created.
3. Rural consumers are comfortable using telephones/mobiles. So the challenge of reducing the complexity of man-machine-interface is ruled out.
4. There rural consumers are still not aware of many new services/products offered. This is a good opportunity to be tapped. At the same time extending support for regional languages is very critical.
5. There is no need to build any new infrastructure. So very minimal cap-ex for deployment.

Only time will tell success of such services. But I am confident that such services make sense in rural India.

The importance of user experience

Multiple companies are competing in the same space to win customers. In terms of price, features and support there is really not much different between one compared with other. Then, whats the differentiating factor between one product (company) to other? The 'user experience' is the answer. Everybody knows how Apple's iPod has disrupted the music industry, thanks to its excellent user experience. Probably iPod is the only gadget my mother can use at first shot without any problem.

I own a Sony Ericsson's p990i, which is one of the high-end mobile phones as of today. It has a whole bunch of features in two different modes. In fact there are many features that I have not used even a single time. I am sure thats the case with any technology product/gadget even if you are a geek. But there is a fundamental design problem with the product (See picture).




The call receive and disconnect buttons are placed next to each other with no gap in between them. Any adult's thumb is bigger than the button size. In my case 4 out of 10 times I end up cutting the call, instead of receiving it. The person on the other end (especially friends and family members) feel that I am cutting the call deliberately. This is a classic example for bad use experience design of p990i. Its very small design error but makes a huge difference for users like me.

Have you ever faced such bad user experience with any product?