bro had phone given, no friedns tio text so downer, crashed tree, locked in surgery, still no friends! Tagged bit and some greats come, yer know what I mean.
Good post, trust it.

Very insightful comment here. I’d say that there are those who never touch the web on a normal PC still. However, for the uses you are thinking about, a 95/5 split does make sense. In the realm of education it probably makes a lot more sense than in general business solutions.

It would be interesting to see if you could create a migration pattern for people who are solely on the mobile phone to also being on the PC web. It’s a really compelling thought actually, and I’m trying to think of examples where this type of thing has been done before. Anyone else know of any?

I too wonder if we (Westerners) don’t tend to solve for our problems and project that on to what we perceive as African needs. We see how rich of an experience it is online and believe that that’s the holy grail. Whereas to someone who has moved from nothing to a mobile phone, the value you add through different layers like mobile accessible job boards is all they need/want and they’re absolutely blown away by that.

Does that make any sense? Kaushal made me really try to think of things objectively, without my rose-colored PC-web glasses on. That’s what I’m trying to do here with this post, and with my answer to your comment.

But I have a picky critique of the phrasing above that “only a certain layer of society really has access to the web, the rest only have access to simple communications through their mobile phone.”

I would personally like to see it restated as “only a certain layer of society really has *24-hour* access to the web, the rest *primarily* have access to simple communications through their mobile phone.”

Picky, I know! 🙂 But I have a strong opinion about it.

Here’s my thinking: Instead of a job board, let’s imagine a new application for teaching students a foreign language (or how to program, or learn economics etc). It seems to me that this could be done in a way that’s very appropriate for those using just a mobile phone. During the week, on the phone, on the bus, students could be using the phone as a flashcard tool, or for taking quizzes, or looking up words. Simple things that are appropriate to the UI. But then, I would love to think that some people could get to the “Real Web,” if only once a week. This could be an incredibly valuable enrichment of the service, assuming the application was designed with this audience in mind.

So this imaginary application is then 95% mobile and 5% web.

I think that 5% could be a big deal: I think it would be the high point of the user experience, something that motivates them to actually do the work on that tiny UI during the week. That once a week time on the web could really enrich the limited interactions on the phone, say, with visualizations of milestones and other classmates’ progress. (It might also help extend that abundant phone savvy into computer literacy.)

Again, the key would be to plan on this 95/5 pattern from the first stage of the application design. It could not be a design afterthought.

The 95/5 scenario says “once a week I get online and can see my work from all week I did on my phone,” while the 100% phone application has a bit more dreary ring to it: “I work on one problem at a time through my phone, while a different layer of society sees everything I’ve done all at once.”

I am concerned that, if we design services under a binary have/have not model then we may end up reinforcing this divide.

But I am optimistic that you do not need to have 24-hour web access to get most of the benefit.

Am I being daft?

While the 95/5 breakdown sounds a bit strange, it seems much more appropriate in many situations than an exclusively mobile solution — and it’s the assumption I’m using for brainstorming about designing Bottom of the Pyramid web applications. I think pushing the entire experience into a phone is not the only way.

… Is it?