Notes Design

The always insightful Jan Chipchase has a short and amazing essay up at Receiver, Vodafone's blog on user experience and mobile technology, and it manages in just a few paragraphs to make not one but two startling but hard to refute arguments.

First, a fresh perspective on user research in developing markets. There have been two common viewpoints on this topic for a while now: either a)it doesn't matter that much, because most of the money is still in the hands of the developed world, or b)it's going to matter soon, because the developing world is growing and adopting technology rapidly, and we're fools to ignore such an opportunity--and anyway, it's the nice thing to do. Chipchase offers a third that trumps them both:

Today over 3 billion of the world's 6.6 billion people have cellular connectivity and it is expected that another billion will be connected by 2010. But what is often overlooked is the disproportionate impact of mobile phones on different societies, which is one of the reasons why, as researchers, we increasingly prefer to spend time in places like Cairo and Kampala: there is simply more to learn.