Designing User Experiences for the Billion user majority market of India.

The first and final goal for any designer is to design for a user whose lifestyle does not match her own lifestyle. Designers in India have gone through laptops and desktops as means for interfacing with technology. The majority market or who we call the Next Billion Users have mostly directly adopted smartphones and they have skipped laptops and desktops. UX Design philosophies, therefore, have to be adjusted when designing for the majority market of India.

 

We shall explore the following areas for our understanding of India’s majority market.

 

  • Large Touch Targets.

  • India loves voice technology.

  • Dividing screens and progress indicators.

  • Words and colors that are our friends.

 

Large Touch Targets


majority market ux examples

 

A UI pattern seen in apps that cater to the majority market of India is the use of large touch targets. Apps like Notion, OneNote or even Twitter use small touch targets on their apps on a regular. With apps like Zomato Delivery Partner, Kisan Suvidha, Animall, GoCoop for Artisans, UrbanCompany Partner etc., the degree of utility they provide our user cannot be compared to the utility of Notion, OneNote, Twitter etc. Our user uses these apps to get things done and make money. There is very little abstraction in the utility these apps provide their users and a slapstick approach in design is, therefore, preferable over vanity.

 

The idea of large touch targets is not bigger buttons. It is about a more in-your-face approach with design. Not having very deeply nested user journeys is a natural extension of this design philosophy.

 

Some of these apps, for example, delivery partner apps, themselves might not have the target market of a billion users but still, they are the backbone of their respective consumer-facing businesses. Making these apps more “in-your-face” lowers operational risks.

 

Design purists might argue good design language within itself addresses these concerns. Our target users however have many different types of life journeys. People’s life experiences can be very different across different regions of the country. This makes it very difficult for a designer to put herself in users’ shoes. It is deceptively difficult to create a persona for these users. UX designers are “standardized” by their journey of becoming a UX designer and same cannot be expected from users because they are not “standardized”. Going with the most unassuming possible design therefore seems to be the only reasonable course of action.

 

India loves Voice Technology

It is fascinating how the Indian market has jumped over several stages of technological advancement and adopted Deep technologies like Natural Language Processing with voice. UX designers unlike our Next Billion Users have been through laptops and desktops before smartphones and as such their understanding of Mobile Interfaces is an extension of Desktop Interfaces.

 

A [report by MMA](https://www.mmaglobal.com/documents/voice-playbook-mma-ammp-voice-audio-initiative) in collaboration with Isobar found voice searches in India are growing at a rate of 270% per year with 82% adoption. The customer also does not seem to care about English being the language through which he interfaces with technology. 70% of new Internet users consume content in their mother tongue.

 

When we zoom in to the data things look even more radical. Hindi is the second most commonly used language for Voice in India, standing second only to English. With a share of 28% Hindi however dominates with a growth rate of 400% every year. What’s more is the Indian mobile user does not just use Voice as a one trick pony for searches through google now, or assistant. Users have developed an understanding with voice as a means of Interfacing inside of apps, like YouTube for example. Mobile users of India are also very experimental with voice. They start with simple “objective inputs” and through experimentation move on to a more “conversational” way of interacting with their devices.

 

“On average, Google Assistant queries are 200 times more conversational and 40 times more action-oriented (“Ok Google: Turn on the lights in the living room”) compared to using Search.”

 

I am also very excited to see how UX designers will leverage this enormous opportunity and design for devices other than smartphones like ATMs, ticketing systems, any other type of Kiosks, voice Biometrics with locks, Apps catering to 40 lakh+ delivery boys across the country and other blue-collar jobs.

 

Condensing entire User Flows into voice commands and/or responses is another thing I’m very excited to see. How instead of a dashboard, a delivery boy for Zomato could get a picture of his entire day just through voice.

 

With so many regional languages it will also be interesting to see how innovations and optimizations trickle down into the long tail of regional languages.

 

Divide forms into multiple multiple screens and always show Progress.

Users do not like long forms PERIOD. Unfortunately however, there are many use cases for the majority market where users have to enter data into forms on their smartphones. We all have encountered a system where we fill in some data into a form, tap “next”, fill in even more data fields, tap “next”, repeat a couple more times and finally tap on “Finish”. This is a decent way to break up a large form into not-so-overwhelming chunks.

Form Progress

When designing a product for tier-2 and 3 of India, I and my team encountered some very interesting problems. Our delivery partner(and factory workers’) app for a daily subscription model business required delivery partners to submit an End of Day report sheet on their phones. We had broken up the form into different pages. We would also pre-fill fields as much as possible. We had also made the app very (what we would call) “tap-tap”. So if a user had to type for a field - a number between 1 and 10, Instead of having our users open their keyboard and type the number, we gave them 10 radio buttons for every number from 1 to 10. If suppose they had to write a number between 1 and 100, we would display our users 10 buttons of ”1-10”, “11-20”, “21-30” and so on to “91-100”, our user would select one and then we would display the 10 respective numbers for that selection. This way instead of opening the keyboard, our user would be done in two taps. Our A/B showed users overwhelmingly preferred this way over opening the keyboard and writing their selections.

 

We observed two problems with how our users were behaving. Every time a new delivery partner joined, they would abandon after filling in the first page of their form-filling journey. The other were users who would fill out the entire form and abandon before the final form submission. UI design suggested a briefing/training for anyone new who joined.

We knew that the training curve was temporary and that our users would learn with time. But we wanted our users to learn autonomously without increasing operational overheads. We added a progress bar to indicate to our users at all times that there was progress yet to be made in their form submission. On the final “page” of our form, the progress bar was designed not go beyond 90%. Users were directly jumped to post form submission without ever displaying 100% because 100% means nothing more needs to be done when final submission and acknowledgment from user still remained.

 

We also introduced, everywhere within the design a “Success” pop-up and animation. This built an exclusive association of success within the app with this animation. This provided our users with an “easily identifiable motif” within the design system. We observed that when we increased the number of “easily identifiable motifs” within our design system, our users started training each other and operational overheads were reduced. This was going half a step further than having a design system with “uniquely identifiable components”.

 

Words and Colors that are our Friends

The majority market of India uses words in a very different way than their absolute meanings. On that account I have observed users respond better to “OK” than “Next”, “Submit”, “Save”, etc.

 

In the anecdote I provided in the previous section, we ended up replacing the word “Submit” with “OK”, because for our users - a thing is not submitted. What does submit even mean? A thing is made “OK”. Didn’t really make sense to us but we had to oblige.

 

I am a big fan of the GPS icon in Animall’s application always accompanied with “पास के पशु दिखाएं” text. Having this on their app’s home screen will earn them the right to get away with only using the icon on some other page down the line.

animall app gps button

 

You may have your brand colors but color associations that already exist within users’ minds are tough to break, and you can either fight it, or lean into it. Every time you break those associations for one user, you will have to break them still for the next 10 users. Blue and Gray for Save and Delete may work for users who have transitioned from desktop browsers; For our next billion users, they have not known many design systems.

 

The primary color design system of Traffic Lights is universally identifiable. Penetrating deeper and deeper into the population you will inevitably reach users who perhaps will have only known this one design language.

So, Red and Green are our friends, communicate positive and negative user flows with these colors and save your opportunity cost for elsewhere.

 

 

India is the second largest mobile market in the world. Similar patterns of smartphone adoption are observed across many Asia Pacific countries. The culture and heterogeneity in users' life journeys in India however makes creating a universal design system into a game of whack-a-mole. As such UX designers need to dial back to simple patterns for it is in that simplicity they will find their common denominators that apply to all.

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