A year in designing for blue collar jobseekers in India
Every country or community has its unique set of problems. And rubbing cliched, westernised solutions on these pain points does not solve them. This article is all about the lessons I learned while designing for past one year in India.
Not every user is John Doe;
Neither all products are social media applications.
A year ago, I left my job at Samsung to join Aasaanjobs as a UI/UX designer. Aasaanjobs is a startup in Indian recruitment sector, with an aim to revolutionise the hiring process for low/mid level jobs across country.
So basically, my role is to design desktop & mobile applications, which help millions of delivery boys, tele-callers, salesmen to find jobs suited for their requirements.
It’s very peculiar group of target users — low income, high demand segment of jobseekers. Such groups are often attributed with poverty, lack of education, hyperlocal interactions. But now, with the introduction of smartphone & internet, this segment has transformed into the ‘The Next Billion Users’ of India.
Designing interfaces for such audience is a not a mundane task. After thousands of design iterations, hundreds of user interviews & user testing sessions, I was able to compile few guidelines around it. And like every design solution, understanding & empathising with the users lie at the core of these guidelines.
I have generalised these learnings to make them applicable for all kinds of digital products available. These observations seemed well suited for emerging digital economies around the world. One can refer to these ideas & use them to solve similar problems arising in their target market.
So, what do “Next Billion Users” seek from your product?
How to serve them well with your designs?
What are the key points to remember?
1. Focus on how users read
Design is all about communication. If your products are unable to convey right information to the users, they will eventually fail to perform desired functions.
So, should we build our apps in native languages? — sure, if you have the bandwidth to do so. But often in big countries like India, where there are thousands of languages spoken across the nation, this becomes difficult. For products displaying fairly large amount of content, the cost of translation shoots up. And again, there’s danger of information getting lost between translations.
So first, try to understand how your users perceive information
Thanks to social media, most of our audience do understand short and simple english keywords — Like, Share, Comment, Location, etc. They frequently use these words in everyday conversations. Hence, while reading, users look for such familiar words in the sentence, link them with context of your product and build best possible story around it. Believe me, that’s dangerous!
A recent example of this would be ‘Active 2 days ago’ tag on our Job Cards. Which essentially represents how active a particular employer is. But, during user testing, I found out that the job seekers were perceiving this information as — ‘Job will be active in 2 days’. That’s exactly opposite to what we’re trying to say!
So, we replaced tag with one word — ‘ ⚡️Active’. As a result, we saw nearly 30% rise in number of applications on active jobs. Our users don’t mind if company was active an hour before or days. They just want to know which companies are actively hiring.
So in general, better content leads to better adoption.
Designers often take Call To Action buttons (CTAs) for granted. CTAs work as navigator for your users to guide through your application. Keep content of these buttons as simple & predictable as possible. Present actions users expect and understand in the context.
For example,‘Buy now’ button for product page, ‘Apply’ for job details, ‘Share’ for social media content. A lot can change by replacing complex content such as ‘Schedule Interview’ with ‘Book Interview’. Keep It Small and Simple.
So the summary would be:
- Focus on how your users read.
- Keep your copy short and simple.
- (Even if you translate it) Use familiar words from day-to-day conversations and commonly used applications.
- Try to provide appropriate context possible using icons and images.
- And most importantly, test your content variety of users.
2. Copy interaction patterns of commonly used applications
(Plagiarism 😲!)
What this means is, keep it simple. Don’t make your application complicated by adding fancy interactions, maps, animations. Just lists and detail pages would suffice. (And that’s what commonly used applications like WhatsApp do!)
There are two major reasons to this. First, your users and second, their devices.
Complicated interactions require learning
…And our users are not really good at it. Unlike most of us, these next billion users got introduced to internet through social apps like WhatsApp, Facebook & Youtube. And majority of them stayed limited to these interfaces only. So, learning is required when you push them to perform any complicated interaction.
There are cheaper and slower smartphones in the world
In countries like India, people can not afford high-end, fast functioning smartphones all the time. And as people use these phones for long period of time, their specifications are many a times not upto the market standards. So, running a complicated interaction might slow down your product experience. Your extra-awesome code, does increase your application size. If it’s on web, takes years to load, consuming lot of user’s precious data.
Hence, as a part of user research, study applications which are commonly used by your target audience. Keep your navigation simple. Use familiar icons, profile avatars, supporting images. Use animations to attract user’s attention.
People can argue about engagement and getting people ‘hooked’ using such interactions. Well, if your numbers don’t fall, go ahead with such innovations. But warning: If you don’t get it right, they are bound to fail.
A common strategy would be to mimic user’s actions from real world. Also, once developers finish the coding, test the feature on some low-end smartphone. (Need some adventure? try reducing the internet speed😅 )
Faster the user learns, better the usage and experience.
3. Assist users to complete their tasks
These new smartphone users don’t surf around internet like we do. If they are visiting your website (which is not yet another social platform 😜), they usually have goal in mind. And they expect a personalised response.
Think of your application as user’s assistant to get things done in faster & smoother manner.
Hence, don’t hide information behind search bars or fancy dashboard cards. Show glimpse of content (which user is going to see inside) well upfront. Take help of information provided by users to show right recommendations.
For example in our case, users come to platform in search of specific job role — be it telesales, delivery boy or accountant. If they do not see jobs related to their profile on first glimpse, chances are, they would not come back to our platform again. Hence, showing job categories upfront has served us well.
Same is the case with list filters. Not all users are smart enough to apply filter to a listing. Hence provide most commonly used filters well ahead, on the face as quick filters. This will help users to narrow down to desired search result faster.
The next big hurdle in the way of The Next Billion Users is ‘Typing’!
Typing = Spelling Mistakes
People are horrible at typing. English language is not the only issue. Typing text in local languages is also a tedious task. Hence, always provide an alternate path for searching content on your app/website. Search suggestions, trending and most recent content sections, also help users a lot in this case.
4. Use power of referrals
People from this segment of world, believe strongly in referrals. Communities are closely knitted. Hence, if a users find something exciting, they share it with their peers. And vice versa!
So, provide users with an options to share whenever possible — when they want to celebrate success, when they want to get suggestions, when they want to refer, etc. Provide incentives for referrals, rewards on each transaction.
Post it on Facebook, forward it on WhatsApp
Your product expands wider than just a mobile application and website. Facebook, WhatsApp and other social media are prime places to reach out to your newer audience. Use these platforms to increase your adoption. Find target Facebook groups. If you have website, share relevant pages into such groups. Make them part of WhatsApp forwards.
In such community structure, oftentimes there are few individuals who understand digital medium better than the others and hence, become pseudo-source of information. These are the ones who help others to order online, help to get right jobs, help to fill their online forms. These are your ‘power users’. Impress them and your numbers will multiply.
Look out for power users
If you do thorough user research, you might come across a few. Few more are generated when you dig through beneficiaries of your product. Invite these people for user interviews, feature feedbacks, prototype testing and more. Keep the feedback loop running!
5. Finally, Do user testing — a lot of it!
Well, this is pretty straightforward. Designers often shy away from user testing — running around in the office, taking opinions on the screens from their colleagues. Make some effort to call actual users. Talk to them for a while. Understand their point of view. Show them your prototypes — what works, what not.
From past couple of months, we have started pushing for more user interviews with all stakeholders — couple of them per week. Part of this article is byproduct of it.
Your target audience — The Next Billion users, is still unexplored. In such as case, we need to unlearn few things that we learnt from western world. Start things from scratch. All the inspirations from Dribbble ought to fail in front of such complex audience. So, let’s go back to first principles.
Talk to users, observe their interactions and then make decisions!
“The Next Billion Users” is already a buzz word amongst designer community. Big technology giants have started investing a lot into it. Google’s Go Apps, Facebook lite version are stepping stones to future products in emerging digital markets.
With invasion of Jio, India is on the verge of digital revolution. It will be interesting to see how design & designers play their role in shaping this bright future.
This story has a sequel now!! Few more learnings, tips, views on designing for Next Billion Users!
Hope you find this article useful. Do share your comments and suggestions.
