THIS young manchild just made a product for the huge untapped Pakistani market! Surprisingly, no one cares!
“I need to educate these users,” says the man while munching on a salted caramel donut from ODonuts — wait, I think he just swapped his salted caramel donut for a plain glazed one while in the middle of his sentence, “I don’t get these people, bro; do they not want to better their lives?”
Whenever the “untapped Pakistani market” is under discussion, someone would bring up the fact that we need to understand it better than we currently do.
When we attempt to understand the market and the users in it, we realize that they “aren’t adept at using technology”; so, of course, we’ll identify a need to “educate” them on how to use technology. For sure, once that’s done, they’ll become active users of our amazing products that we made just for them!
I understand that approach — after all, someone at some stage in our own lives taught us how to use a certain product in a certain way; but can we, for once, stop treating our users the way Ellen treats her Gen Z guests?
Hahahaha you don’t know how to correctly unfold and refold an actual map XD XD XD LMAO LAUGH AT THIS PERSON FOR NOT KNOWING HOW A ROTARY PHONE WORKS XD
Sorry, hit a nerve there.
Stop treating people like they’re inferior. Can we… can we please just stop doing that?
We speak about empathizing with our users and how complicated our platforms can be to use for them — our first instinct is to help them understand and use technology that we are comfortable using.
If we’re trying to build a product for any sort of users, we need to make technology adapt to them. We have to start understanding their lifestyle and their everyday consumption patterns. How does their day start? What makes them smile? How are they using the things around them to improve their lives? Do they even need to learn how to use a mobile app for a solution that they themselves made using whatever resources they had available to them?
Every single person is smart. They intelligently utilize whatever resources are available to them, in order to improve their lifestyle. If you think you can come up with a better way for them to live, try and find an improvement in their lifestyle that isn’t you theorizing from the outside looking in. Once you’re able to identify that improvement, define that as a problem statement that focuses on the internalities and the externalities of that particular situation; and make a product that improves your user’s lifestyle and is effortless to use.
We all want to improve; but we all have a different understanding of what improvement is.
Stop thinking of technology as an aspiration for people whom you believe cannot use it. Rather, make technology adapt to the needs of these people; much like the people before you, who molded technology so that it will be easier for you to use. Before you even realized it.
