7 things to keep in mind while building for next billion users

হ্যালো,
మీరు ఎలా ఉన్నారు ?
நீங்கள் பெரியதை செய்கிறீர்கள் என்று நம்புகிறோம். ਆਓ ਇਸ ਨੂੰ ਸ਼ੁਰੂ ਕਰੀਏ.

Were you able to read and understand all the above-written lines? If yes, hats off to you, but if you got the feeling of “wtf is written here”, you’ll relate to the problem that many million Indian users of internet face, The barrier of language.

A report from the Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) and market research firm IMRB International last year said that India has 353 million Internet users. Out of those 127 million are local language internet users. The number of local language Internet users in India is growing at 47% year-on-year. India has a large scope for local language Internet as non-English speaking population constitute 88% of the population.

But when you talk about building for billions in India, It’s not only the language barrier that you have to keep in mind. We at Agrahyah Technologies are on a mission to make sure that every Indian is able to make full use of the internet through their smartphones. In our journey so far, we’ve learnt a few lessons we would love to share with you. Here we’ll discuss various issues specific to Indians including language and how can we make efforts to solve them.

1. Indic is a must
   As we mentioned above to make your solutions reach a larger chunk of users, you must think beyond building products only in English. To succeed in the rapidly growing IT industry of India, Indic is one must-have component. You may start by building your products in only one Indian language, if not many. you’ll be reaching out to a number of users which will be larger than the whole population of half of the countries on this planet. That’s how big India is, every state is a world in itself. So try to build for a world first.

2. Don’t do it for namesake
   In continuation of the language barrier we are talking about, it is important to understand that we should try building products ground up in Indic languages. Translating an all-English product into a vernacular one doesn’t work. The context of text shown to the user doesn’t always fit while translating it. The other thing to be considered is that when you are implementing translations, think thoroughly of what is to be translated and what is to be transliterated. For example, nobody calls a train, “लोह-पथ-गामिनी” in Hindi anymore. When you are trying to solve a problem, do it like you want to, not like you need to.

3. Icons, we don’t always get them.
   It’s almost every day that we use the products that we build. We understand each and every part of it. From every icon to every button, what it means and why is it there? But the User doesn’t and as the most of the Indian smartphone and Internet users are pretty new at this. It is pretty hard for them to understand the “why” of the icons and buttons by just seeing. A great and simple solution for this is to provide support text with these icons and buttons depicting their functionality or use to the user. Makes life a lot easier.

4. High-speed internet? It’s not America.
   Despite various efforts of telecom companies and government the network connectivity in India still remains to be flaky. The problem doesn’t seem to have a near-future solution as the density of the user is a major reason for it. Along with this most of the Indian smartphone user still, use 2G or 3G internet connections. The network speed and data limit aren’t that great on them. So we should try to build our product in such a way that they are able to work efficiently on such low bandwidth and flaky networks. A good product shouldn’t be completely dependent on the network to perform its actions. It should also not make high data usage calls when the user is on low on data. Users will love your products even more if they don’t cost them a fortune.

5. The battery is Still an Issue
   Though many companies are coming up with smartphones with large battery capacity, the battery life cycle of the smartphones in India generally is not very good. One of the reasons for this is the very same flaky network we discussed above. So to solve this problem your solutions must be smart. An application should not be making a high battery using network calls when the user’s smartphone is running low on battery. We should schedule our background sync of data using the network when the user has a decent amount of battery in his/her smartphone.

6. Think Offline
   Despite many telecom companies making a large chunk of data available to users at pretty low cost, we Indians have a tendency to close the data connection off when not needed. Along with this most of us are prepaid users, so each time a data call is made, we are notified about the loss of single paisa from our account. So an application should not be making excessive network calls regularly. It would be great to build a product which does most of its job despite data being turned off. It should only make network calls only if necessary.

7. Simplicity is the key
   It would be better if we keep our applications simple and easy to use. There is no point making the user do rounds of unnecessary stuff. Show them what your application does, not how fancy your UI looks. An application should have an UI that is easy to understand and provides a great UX. The things that the user is going to use the most should be just a click away, not hidden in layers of menus. Similarly, it’s not fruitful to waste your application screen real estate in showing option which user is going to use very least.

These were the few, not all points that you should keep in mind while building for billions in India. Let’s hope you provide a great product to our fellow Indians.