Mobile Banking in Delhi!

Just read an article in The Economic Times about money transactions being tested by aam-junta through mobile phones.
The article however, does not mention details about payment gateways and what are the participating operators and banks doing for trust issues and security concerns.
If the scenario mentioned below is true, then this could be the next revolution for the great Indian masses.

Some excerpts-

“A pilot phase has already been successful between HDFC and Bharti Airtel in West Delhi. Chemist shops, general stores, residents, NGOs, anybody can register to become an authorized outlet. ET spent a day with one such outlet – Gupta Medicals doubling as an authorized mobile banking outlet in West Delhi to find out how the system works.

A customer (Kamla) comes to the shop in immediate need of Rs 200. She comes to the outlet and asks for withdrawal from her mobile bank account. Sumit Gupta, the outlet owner SMSes from Kamla’s mobile phone the following code – “*543*123*(the outlet’s mobile number)*200*Kamla’s 10-digit Pin code#”. He sends the SMS to 54321. Instantly, Rs 200 get deposited into the outlet’s account withdrawn from Kamla’s HDFC account. Mr Gupta hands over Rs 200 to Kamla with which she goes and buys fresh flowers for garlands. The transaction takes less than five minutes.

In order to confirm the transaction, HDFC bank sends an SMS to Kamla’s phone: – “Balance in your HDFC account as of 3/7/2008 is INR 900.” Kamla’s account is a no frills account. To graduate to a savings bank account she will have to submit additional documents.

With Mobile Money Transfer (MMT), the user can transfer funds to a mobile number, that is registered with mChek with a valid VISA card or to any 16digit VISA card number in the country. About Rs 20 is charged for a card-to-card transfer.

The SMS receipt can also be treated as a legal document under the new IT Act. Overall, while operators seem gung-ho on the service, it remains to be seen how much popularity mobile banking will find amongst India’s 270 million odd mobile subscribers and whether it will encourage 90% of the population which uses no bank to open a bank account.”

You can also read the full article.

Filed under: Copy+Paste, Indian

On My Reading List

Alan Moore is one of the most famous writers for graphic novels and comics. The ones that I have read are  V for Vendetta, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and Batman- The Killing Joke. Incidentally, I haven’t been able to read his most famous work, which now is being made into a film, Watchmen.

I have high hopes of “Watchmen” because of
1. Zack Snyder- Watchmen is being directed by the guy who floored me with the movie adaptation of 300.
2. Alan Moore- When you read his work, you can almost feel the era in which the stories are set (he. The atmosphere is so complex and mysterious, yet so real. Watchmen is not one of the first comics which tries to show the “other” side of super-heroes, but it is certainly the most sophisticated and celebrated one.
I hope to read it asap! Meanwhile check out the trailer for the film!

Filed under: Inspiring

… and the User will Follow

This will be a growing post. As I find them, this post will have a collection of views to a different approach for designing products.
Here are some quotes from guys who do not employ standard usability practices to collect user requirements, or do not make designs based on usability principles or don’t test prototypes with users.

What I will get to is-
There is no one way of making a great product. A great product always addresses the right questions with the right answers. (Click on the icons to read from the source)

Flickr (Catrina Fake)
“What did you do for usability testing?”

• Almost none, got it out early as Paul also suggested
• Flickr Alpha was the usability testing- “put it out with its zits and blemishes”
• Heavy monitoring of/posting on their support forums
• “Users don’t have a problem teling you that something really sucks…”

Google (Marissa Mayer)
“When I first started testing in 2000, we tested once a month. Now, we’re user testing almost every week. We’ll do a site-wide test once a month or so, with some tasks, but more free-form, just to see where people go, where they encounter problems. The other three weeks of the month, we test specific features. Adwords, for example, is a new product that’s big enough that it needs its own test – it can’t be layered into a sitewide test. So we test every 10 days, usually with eight users each. We want to find the big problems, and with eight users we definitely get to that level.

Popcap (Casual Game Creators)
“So we’re building games that are fun for us first. That’s the first test. After that, we try to make them more accessible to everyone else.

Conversely, we get asked if we make games specifically for women. It’s one of the challenges when we talk about the company. People think it’s games for girls. More of our customers are women than men. They ask us if we do focus tests with soccer moms. We don’t.

We don’t really track development costs to see how much time we spent. I liken it to other creative processes like writing a novel. How much does it cost to write a novel? Does it matter? It’s more about how can you get a good novel written. The creating of the novel is hard to measure.”

Steve Jobs’ perspective on “designing for you”
“We figure out what we want. And I think we’re pretty good at having the right discipline to think through whether a lot of other people are going to want it, too. That’s what we get paid to do.”

37 Signals (Basecamp creators)
“Designing for ourselves first yields better initial results because it lets us design what we know. It lets us assess quality quickly and directly, instead of by proxy. And it lets us fall in love with our products and feel passionate about what we make. There’s simply no substitute for that.

David Lewis (Bang & Olufsen)
“All designers for B&O — not just me and my team of six — are external. The company believes in it. My six-member team aside, designers for B&O don’t ever meet, we don’t have any cooperation with one another at all.”

“Today there’s too much pressure, not just for designers. It’s disappointing in a way. You can miss cool things — afterthoughts, great little ideas — in the design process because it goes so fast.”

“I think you can’t go out and ask people what they need or want because they don’t know. The whole trick is to come out with a product and say, “Have you thought of this?” and hear the consumer respond, “Wow! No, I hadn’t.” If you can do that, you’re on.”

Malcolm Gladwell on Spaghetti Sauce
“The mind doesnt know what the tongue wants.”

Filed under: Uncategorized

Newly Hatched!

I have barely gotten used to Twitter (use it to write one-liners, getting news updates and making a plan with friends) and now the mother bird has given rise (or birth) to a brand new desi twitter called SMSGupShup (rhymes with Numsum- Gupshup means gossip). Its by the guys who started Webaroo (the “offline” wikipdia).

Personally, the mobile is a very exciting market for India with the breadth of users spreading from very low-end phones to very smart-phones. India has a far more reach of mobile (about 250 million mobile-literate as compared to 65 million pc literate). SMS is already being used in India for a lot of utilitarian services like sending climate forecast to farmers and selecting best prices for selling their crops/vegetables. A service in India will really be a mass success if it solves basic problems at the rural level or is finanace -related.

Meanwhile, you can read about SMSGupShup on GigaOm. However, I do not believe the traffic numbers that SMSGupShup have published and still believe Twitter has much higher traffic. I have signed up just now and I hope I dont get spammed!

Filed under: Uncategorized

Help

Filed under: Uncategorized

Meebo♥Ux

Meebo hires their first interaction designer! Andrew has already started taking feedback from users on his projects through the Meebo blog!
http://blog.meebo.com/?p=457

With 35 Million unique visitors per month, Meebo is a force to reckon with. It gives me another example of companies who don’t hire UX people when they start, but have realized its importance over time.
IM on it, are you?

Filed under: Case Studies