Category: Mobile apps development

Taking the social mobile “taste test”

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“After all is said and done, a lot more will be said than done” –
Unknown author

Twitter has been abuzz lately with fascinating snippets of advice on how to succeed, how not to fail, what makes a good social venture, what makes a good mobile project or how to be a successful social entrepreneur. Of course, it’s easy to say these things, and even easier to repeat mantras and slogans which fit a popular or emerging philosophy. Who could argue, for example, that “users should be put first”?

Sadly, when all is said and done, the reality is that it’s still much easier to ignore the advice and go do your own thing your own way, rather than doing things the right way.

The best way to get a sense of the true philosophy – the DNA – of a project is to see if it passes a “taste test”. This is particularly true in mobile, where almost all initiatives claim to have engaged or active communities, or to empower, to put users first, or to have been ‘born’ in the field. The question is: Does the rhetoric actually match the reality? In an age where more and more projects are coming under increasing scrutiny, ensuring they are properly positioned is crucial.

It’s quite easy to determine whether or not a tool is going to be of any use to an end user (an NGO in this case), or whether you’d need a medium to high degree of technical literacy to make use of it (in which case you might argue that the tool was more developer-focused). For some time I’ve used the concept of the “social mobile long tail” to graphically represent this.

In short, tools in the red area are technically and financially out-of-reach of many grassroots NGOs, many of whom sit in the green space. Tools at the higher end of the graph are generally more complex, server-based systems which require a high degree of technical competence, and often the Internet, to set up and use. Tools in the lower end are simple, low-cost, need few technical skills, work on easily available hardware, don’t require the Internet, and are easy to install and run. Tools in the green space can be quickly adopted and replicated – within hours – whereas tools at the other end need much more planning, i.e. more people and more lead time, and most likely a degree of training.

So, how might we determine where a tool should be placed on the “social mobile long tail”? There are likely many measures and metrics, but I’d say these are a few of the more obvious ones the user would be principally concerned with:

  • Does the project have a user-facing, NGO-friendly website?
  • How technical is the language on the site?
  • Is there an easily accessible, open, visible user community?
  • How easy is the software to find, download and install?
  • Will it work on widely available hardware and software in the places where it will be used?
  • Can the user independently deploy the tool if they want to?

For some time I’ve wondered whether it would be worth scoping out the mobile landscape and plot available tools along the tail. Not only would it satisfy my general curiosity, but it could be immensely valuable to an NGO community which still largely struggles to understand the mobile technologies they believe – and hope – they should be using.

Video: Mobile Phones for Development

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Date: Monday 20th September, 2010
Venue: London School of Economics
Speakers: Dr Jenny Aker, Ken Banks, Dawn Haig-Thomas
Chair: Diane Coyle

IGC Growth Week 2010 Public Discussion

“Mobile phones have the potential to contribute significantly to economic growth in the developing world, in both the private and public sector. From improving market information for fish traders in Lake Victoria, to enabling medical outreach services in rural South Asia, the mobile is a versatile and adaptable tool. What impact can mobiles have on those previously excluded from financial services and communications networks? Which policies will help turn the promise of mobiles into real benefits for the poorest people?

This session, moderated by Diane Coyle, OBE, of Enlightenment Economics, features a panel of researchers and practitioners sharing ideas and experience from the field, discussing a range of case studies from literacy and conditional cash transfer programs in Niger to SMS-based communications for rural hospitals in Malawi”.

Jenny Aker is assistant professor of development economics at The Fletcher School of International Affairs, Tufts University.

Ken Banks is the founder of FrontlineSMS and kiwanja.net.

Dawn Haig-Thomas is director of the GSM Association Development Fund.

Further details of the event, including an audio version of the discussion, are available on the London School of Economics website.

Dissecting “m4d”: Back to basics

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Do the majority of people working in “mobiles for development” work in mobile, or development? It may seem like an odd question, but how people approach “m4d” may have more of an impact on success or failure than we think.

The world of social mobile isn’t short of anecdotes. “Put the user first”, “Consider the technology only at the very end”, “Don’t re-invent the wheel” and “Build with scale in mind” are just a few. Ignore these and failure won’t be far around the corner, we’re told. But maybe we’re missing something here. Sure, there’s a growing number of ‘best’ practices, but one thing we rarely seem to question are the very credentials of the project origin itself.

Everyone from donors to project managers and technologists to journalists are keen to identify traits or patterns in ‘failed’ mobile projects. Many of their conclusions will point to poor planning, poor technology choice or lack of collaboration, but sometimes the biggest failure may have taken place long before anyone got near a mobile phone.

What I wonder is this. Do we know what ratio of “m4d” projects are initiated by development practitioners (or sectoral experts in health, agriculture, conservation and so on) as opposed to mobile technologists, and what impact does this have on the success or failure of the project? In other words, if the problem solver is primarily a mobile technologist – the “m” part of “m4d” – then you might assume they have much less understanding of the on-the-ground problem than a development practitioner or sectoral expert might – the “d” part.

Does this bear out in reality? If failure does turn out to be higher among technologists then this is a relatively easy problem to fix, whereas many of the other perceived reasons for failure are not. It’s all about getting back to basics.

(Click here for more observations on mobile development).

I’ve always maintained that the people closest to the problem have the best chance of coming up with a solution, and this probably bears out in many cases, particularly in the ICT4D field. Ushahidi, started by Kenyans to solve a Kenyan crisis – and DataDyne, a health-based data collection solution designed by a paediatrician – immediately spring to mind. In these instances, being up-close and dirty with the problem came well in advance of any technology-based solution to it. The same goes for our very own FrontlineSMS initiative, borne out of a series of visits to South Africa and Mozambique back in 2003/2004.

In any discipline, the greater the rate of innovation the greater the problem of focus, and mobile is no exception. As Bill Easterly put it in a recent post in response to questions from students about how they might help “end world poverty”:

Don’t be in such a hurry. Learn a little bit more about a specific country or culture, a specific sector, the complexities of global poverty and long run economic development. At the very least, make sure you are sound on just plain economics before deciding how you personally can contribute. Be willing to accept that your role will be specialized and small relative to the scope of the problem. Aside from all this, you probably already know better what you can do than I do

This is great advice, and not just for economists. If mobile and health is your thing, focus on health and get very good at it. If it’s mobile and agriculture, or mobile and election monitoring, do the same. Whatever your area of interest, get out and understand the issues where they matter – on the ground – and don’t get totally sidetracked by the latest trends, technologies or disciplines. Whatever the reason for your interest in ‘mobiles for development’, make sure you don’t forget the importance of understanding the ‘development’ bit.

Focus is highly underrated, and often debates around technology choice, open source, challenges of scale and “understanding your users” are distractions from a much-less discussed but equally vital question. And that’s this.

“Who’s best placed to run a successful “m4d” project – the m‘s or the d‘s?”.

Mobile Design. Sans Frontieres.

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Although I find myself intrigued by the convergence of computer science, human computer interaction (HCI) design and international development, it’s not often that I find myself in a room of experts. They’re just not places I tend to mix, most likely because I have no professional IT qualifications, let alone a computer science degree, and I’ve done most of my own software design off-the-cuff, much to the dismay of people who hoped there was a robust process behind it.

Last August I got my first taste of the very real challenges that the computer science world faces when it comes up against the equally real challenges of international development. The meeting – convened at UC Berkeley – was an eye-opener for me to say the least, and as I left I blogged about how thankful I was that it wasn’t me who had to come up with the answers. You can read that post here.

A little later in the year I was invited to speak at the First International Workshop on Expressive Interactions for Sustainability and Empowerment, held at one of Vodafone’s London offices. The topic of conversation was similar, but here the focus was on how to build mobile tools that work in difficult, challenging, ‘foreign’ environments. Following my talk I was invited by the Editor of Interfaces, John Knight, to contribute an article to the next edition of their magazine.

For the article I teamed up with Joel Selanikio, co-founder of DataDyne.org and the creator of the EpiSurveyor mobile data collection tool. It made sense working with Joel for a number of reasons. Not only have I known and admired him and his work for some time, but Joel is first and foremost a paediatrician. For him – like me – understanding the problem takes priority over the technology, consideration of which should always come last. FrontlineSMS and EpiSurveyor have both evolved from time spent in the field – observing, experiencing and understanding before designing, developing and building.

You can read our thoughts on the process – “Ten things you might want to know before building for mobile“ – in the current edition of Interfaces magazine (PDF, 2.5Mb).

For further posts on the subject see the “Mobile applications development” section of this blog, which includes a 10 minute video on the topic.