Approaches to Local Content: Realising the Smartphone Opportunity

"[S]martphones have the potential to open up a more vibrant ecosystem, with a growing number of commercial competitors, increasing consumer choice. This has the potential to drive both economic development, digital inclusion, and access to knowledge - but only if the ecosystem is generating valuable, locally relevant content."

In 2014, the GSMA and the Mozilla Foundation formed a partnership in order to explore approaches to stimulating local content creation in new smartphone markets. This partnership was based on the insight that the falling cost of smartphones would allow most people on the planet to have access to a computer; by the end of 2020, it is expected that there will be 3 billion people using the mobile internet in the developing world, the majority of whom will be using smartphones. This report examines the role low-cost smartphones, digital skills, and content creation can play in creating a more locally relevant web. Three principal questions are considered:

1. What is the baseline of digital literacy that is required for users to embrace the mobile internet and to begin the journey toward becoming a "content creator"?
2. What kinds of tools and user education programmes could radically lower the barriers to content creation?
3. Could investments in these kinds of training and tools have positive impact the digital ecosystem in "mobile-first" countries?

The report incorporates findings from several research methods, including:

• 12 weeks of ethnographic field research between August 2014 and July 2015. This field research provides a snapshot in time of smartphone owners' attitudes toward the mobile internet, as well as their motivations and constraints regarding mobile content creation.
• A year of user-centred design, software prototypes, iteration, user testing and experimentation, to test several theories of how to activate users to become creators and ambassadors of the mobile internet.
• Two pilot studies testing the impact digital skills training and content creation tools have on new smartphone users.
• Desk-based analysis.

Specifically, the report shares lessons from the design and development of Mozilla Webmaker, a free and open source tool intended to make mobile content creation accessible to anyone with an entry-level smartphone. In designing Webmaker, the Mozilla team worked closely with volunteers and local users, taking insights into a tight, iterative feedback loop. In countries including Bangladesh, Brazil, Indonesia, and Kenya, Mozilla volunteers organised task forces, ranging from customer support to event facilitation, teaching, marketing, and user research. Here, the "design charette" method was used, where potential users are involved in the design of the product itself. When describing how they would like the product to work, participants were relieved from any pressure that could be related to low digital confidence. One example of this approach was to select participants to take part in informal workshops, provide them with paper, pens, and stickers, and ask them to design content and applications they would like to be able to create. These participants were also provided one very thin and unlimited piece of paper strip - representing the infinite scrolling of a smartphone screen - and a set of stickers, representing the building blocks Mozilla had envisioned for Webmaker (text, image, link, button, map). With these constraints in mind, participants started creating their mobile apps, and Mozilla observed users' content creation behaviours, from the ideation process to the presentation.

Before beginning development on the Webmaker mobile software, testing involved the use of Appmaker, a proof-of-concept, desktop-based content creation tool by Mozilla. In partnership with Souktel Mobile Solutions and local development implementers in Cambodia and Rwanda, youth were challenged to imagine and create mobile applications in a single afternoon. Without any prior coding knowledge or advanced digital skills, participants created apps; in Cambodia, the winning project was an educational app teaching children the alphabet and basic reading skills, and in Rwanda, the winning app was a mobile health solution for hospital patients, which included reminders to take medicine and the ability to write reviews of Rwandan hospitals. Mozilla used insights from this process to refine their content creation software, making it more responsive to user needs. In one year, over 20 software prototypes were created, which were live-tested and informed by hundreds of users in the field.

Initial pilots of Webmaker in Bangladesh, Cambodia, India, Kenya, and Rwanda - the results of which are explored in the report - suggest that pushing tools and user education for young people to be creative in emerging markets has the potential to create significant positive effects in user confidence, "long tail" content creation (for small, niche audiences), and user initiative. For instance, among a group of youth who participated in Webmaker field testing in Cambodia and Rwanda, the number of participants feeling "very confident" about using the Web increased from 27% to 65% during the course of a month. It is noted that larger scale, live market trials of Webmaker and other tools are required to further validate the opportunities implied here.

Through this process, the GSMA and Mozilla learned several lessons. Essential to all of them was the importance of following the central principle of good design: keeping the focus on the end user. Here are some observations related to mobile content creation in emerging markets:

1. There is a latent appetite a strong appetite for such tools among mobile users in developing countries, and significant potential to increase content creation with local communities across Africa, Asia, and the Americas. Research participants and user testers were reportedly excited and enthusiastic about the idea of creating for the internet. In contrast, similar testing showed that users in Europe and North America were less enthusiastic and already sensitised to the concept of publishing for a wider audience.
2. Sharing is a powerful motivator for original content creation. In some of the testing contexts, the GSMA and Mozilla observed that the social incentives for "sharing" content provide the hook that leads a user to generate his or her own original content. It can be motivating and rewarding for a young person to gain attention among friends and family who have shared or liked their content on Facebook.
3. Initial prototypes of Webmaker assumed that enabling people to bring their micro-businesses online would be an attractive user proposition. However, user testing did not reveal significant demand for this kind of general purpose tool, notably because micro-businesses across the developing world are already managing their businesses using social applications such as WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook. Rather than socialising and serving a specific digital commercial niche, Webmaker evolved into a more general content creation platform focusing on visual, hyperlinked content that is not possible to create with existing tools.
4. The fact that some are new to the Web, or to content creation, does not mean that those creating platforms and applications should underrate their ability to handle and even enjoy complexity. The initial Webmaker prototype used a series of pre-designed templates that users would customise and edit. This required little effort from the user who simply had to edit the existing templates with their own content. However, testing revealed that users were quickly bored by the process, and that this authoring system was too simplistic to realise many of the users' ideas.
5. Users do not want to create the same content as everyone else. During workshops, participants continually broke free of restrictions, escaping the templates and the grids they were provided with to experiment. This resulted in a dramatic change within Webmaker's design, meaning the adoption of more open-ended navigation and the allowing of more branching content and ability for the user to "tinker" with the product. Ultimately, organisers say, leaving room for self-expression and differentiation on the part of the user is crucial.

Regardless of nationality, gender or socioeconomic status, it is clear from research described in this report that many new users of the internet are held back by their lack of digital skills. All of the content generation opportunities related to smartphones assume that users have a model for how to leverage the internet. However, significant numbers of users do not have the skills to get the most out of the device. Their exposure to technology has primarily been as content consumers. This means that they are less likely to acquire the content creation habits and conventions of internet users who were primed on more production-friendly platforms like personal computers, with large displays, complex inputs, and a greater number of pathways to advanced creation. In this context, Mozilla has developed a "web literacy" framework to describe the skills and understanding needed to fully participate on the Web. Web literacy emphasises more holistic knowledge and understanding needed to read, write, and participate on the web, rather than competency with specific applications. A "web literate" person need not understand all the mechanics of the mobile internet. However, they will have a range of "soft skills" that enable them to supplement their own knowledge of the internet through directed exploration. Based on research and pedaegogical philosophy, GSMA and Mozilla suggest the following 3 key principles when designing a curriculum:

1. Learning through interest - e.g., in order to elicit curiosity, a designer can create a situation in which the learner's expectations are subverted by their observations or experience.
2. Learning by doing - e.g., the effective use of the internet requires developing skills in mental spatial orientation (i.e. building a mental model for how to navigate digital spaces). These skills are best acquired in practice and cannot be taught abstractly.
3. Learning through collaboration - e.g., collaborative user experiences can lessen intimidation caused by technology. Social learning can also help lower literacy users internalise complex systems, as friends and family members show the way. This helps lessen the cognitive stress of paying attention and memorising cues about what might be coming up or remember where they came from.

The report concludes with recommendations for different groups: mobile network operators, or MNOs (e.g., experiment with informal training programmes and agent support resources that impart more general web skills at the point of transaction); development organisations (e.g., engage development programme beneficiaries themselves in contextualising, remixing, packaging, distributing, and sharing development information - for instance, equipping youth to create apps for sharing health information); and application and service providers (e.g., sensitise users in emerging markets to the possibility of freely publishing to an audience wider than their friends or family).

"Over the coming years, it is essential that users in emerging markets are able to build and shape a web that is relevant to them. This will require coordinated effort from the mobile industry, the development community, governments, innovators, and digital entrepreneurs worldwide. By prioritizing this common goal, we believe that campaigns and targeted programs could dramatically increase user-driven content creation, and therefore ensure the relevance of the web."