Designing and Deploying Mobile Technologies for Social Impact: Lessons Learned from Designing for Urban Sex Workers in India and Young Internet Users in Ghana

The global spread of mobile phones has led to several technology explorations for social impact. How can we design human-centered solutions for socio-economic development that are locally relevant and meaningful, ensuring they get used and have impact? In this talk, I will present two research studies from designing and deploying technologies for social impact in India and Ghana. In the first half, I will discuss how we designed and deployed a phone audio broadcasting system for microfinance and health reminders for a urban sex worker community in India (work with Microsoft Research India). I'll discuss how we built trust, protected privacy, built design principles based on our ethnographic research, and share our lessons learned from designing and evaluating the system for a hard-to-reach user group.

 

In the second half, I will discuss the design and evaluation of a mobile Internet tool to make data usage information transparent, called SmartBrowse (work with Google.org). In emerging economies, mobile data is on the rise, but is particularly expensive. I'll share our design journey from creating mobile data transparency concepts to deploying and evaluating the tool with 300 Android users for 10 weeks in a university in Ghana, including findings such as how SmartBrowse led to a significant reduction in Internet credit spend and increased online activity, and lessons learned from running a large-scale trial.