Who Wants To Address An Uncontested Market of 1 Billion People?

“Orality” refers to the modes of thinking, speaking and managing information in societies where technologies of literacy (especially writing and print) are unfamiliar to most people. Orality encompasses not just speech but a wide range of modes for personal and collective information management that are preferred to text in oral cultures - from pictures, tallies and cash, to apprenticeship, rituals and songs. In short, all the practices so common in villages and poor communities worldwide.

MicroSave just completed a fascinating piece of work with My Oral Village (MOV) using our Market Insights for Innovation and Design (MI4ID) methods, combined with MOV's approach to understanding numeric cognition, working memory and OIM (oral information management). We used these tools to examine the oral segment and develop/ test a wireframe for a smartphone interface to allow them to transact with confidence. The combination of human centred design (HCD) and behavioural approaches used in the MI4ID approach provided some startling insights that we will need to address if we want to ensure digital financial services include, rather than exclude, the mass market.

So here are some of the key findings:

The oral segment includes about 264 million Indians (including 23 million youth aged 15-24) – this is 32% of the adult population … and includes many who have nominally studied to beyond the class 5 cut-off usually used to define literacy. Most oral adults cannot decode multi-digit numeral strings (place-value) in large numbers, especially 4 or more digits (e.g. 5,045/5,405). Zero in the middle of number causes particular problems. This numeric cognitive disability will inhibit the use of mobile wallets, diverting users, whether literate or not, towards ‘over-the-counter’ solutions. Interestingly, most oral Indians are still not familiar with the new rupee symbol (?). Men have learnt stronger mental calculation skills than women – primarily because they have had more practical experience and practice doing these calculations in their daily interactions and businesses. This was further reflected in the fact that mental calculation skills increased with age in both sexes and across occupations dealing in cash – so market traders are, unsurprisingly, very accomplished mental calculators. This practical experience of dealing with cash is key to bridging between verbal and written number systems – so cash plays an important role in cognitive development and literate numeracy.

Source: Oral Financial Numeracy

Despite these challenges, the oral segment has many strengths that can be leveraged, including common ability to:

?      read 1-2 digit numbers,

?      count and manipulate 4-digit numeric sums using cash notes and coins - relying on colour, proportional sizes, shapes and images, as well as numbers,

?      conduct basic mental calculations like addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, ratio – acquired through participation in the cash economy.

The ‘semi’ or ‘neo-numerate’ population (about 1 in 3 in our sample) could decode only one or two of the three numeral strings we showed in screening, but they did perform better in all parts of our detailed numeracy diagnostic test, and most could read with reasonable fluency. This highlights that innumeracy may actually be a bigger issue than illiteracy.

In response we developed ‘MoWO’ (Mobile Wallet for the Oral), a unique, HCD-informed, user experience prioritising usability and user experience for the oral segment. To develop this, we used a process that involved: iteration between design/field; rapid prototyping; and testing of usability to facilitate ‘guessability’ and learnability. The resultant interface uses ‘oral information management’ (OIM) principles and devices; offers a ‘sandbox’ where oral users can learn numeracy without risking financial loss; uses devices like oral iconography, declarative/mnemonic pictures, colour, gesture and voice; provides a unique cash-based ‘input-method editor’ (IME) so users can input large numbers safely; and has functionalities to send money, request money, add money, and pay bills as well as offering an image-based phone book.

All of this led us to make recommendations for financial service providers and other stakeholders:

?      The oral segment should be treated as separate and distinct in digital financial services.

?      FSPs targeting part or all of the segment should empirically test capabilities to identify relevant strengths and weaknesses of users to build highly usable and learnable designs.

?      Early adopters in the segment may include youth aged 25-35, who are adopters of other mobile phone features like calculators and address books, and

?      An open-source library of oral icons, addressing the full range of digital financial services, should be developed for India.

This exercise needs to be repeated in all countries where a significant proportion of the population is illiterate and/or innumerate and also to develop interfaces for feature phones as the penetration of smart phones may not be moving forward as quickly as we had all hoped. If not we risk further exacerbating the digital divide in the context of financial services.

You can (and should!) read the full report here: Digital Wallet Adoption for the Oral Segment in India: Concept Development for MoWo (Mobile Wallet for Oral).