Student – Kenya
After completing our first research trip in Bangladesh, Webmaker went to Kenya!
These trips are part of an ongoing research program we are conducting to study technology and design approaches that enable greater participation on the mobile Web and help grow the creation of local content.
We spent three weeks in November between Nairobi, Kisumu, Mombasa and Nakuru, to understand how people adopt, use and leverage the Web in their personal and professional lives.
We conducted in-depth interviews with 59 research participants from all walks of life (artists, students, teenagers, business owners …) and organised a Design Day with 14 university students, where we brainstormed about content creation, and paper prototyped mobile apps.
From this experience, we extracted findings such as:
* Many people are not aware that a greater Internet exists beyond Whatsapp, and are limiting their use of the Web to Social Media,
* People in Kenya have a unique way of using mobile data, almost like a currency,
* There is a crucial lack of local content, blocking non-english speakers to access the Web,
* Making, as an activity, is not considered cool,
* Remixing is viewed as a crime,
and more !
Based on this research, we mapped Webmaker‘s potential users according to their digital literacy levels and their motivations and constraints when using the Web, and we wrote a set of personas portraits, to understand better who we are designing for.
You can discover all of this research in the Webmaker’s Field Research Report from Kenya.
We are currently in India doing our next phase of research. Watch this space for our report from that trip and please contact us with any feedback at: mobileopportunity@mozilla.org.