Journey to explore the Indonesian mobile life
On July 14, the Taipei UX team embarked on an incredible journey to Jakarta to explore the mobile life of Indonesians. It was the first time that we had conducted a formal user research on our own. And thanks to Ruby Hsu, a new user researcher addition to the team, that we finally had the talent, time and resource to do it.
Why Indonesia? First of all, it has the third largest number of internet users in Asia. Secondly, it’s an emerging market with high mobile usage. Finally, the Mozilla community in Indonesia has historically been (and still is) extremely strong and active. The local contexts and research logistics they have provided were indispensable.
Preliminary research
Prior to this research, the team had looked through a few relevant research, which included:
- 2013 Firefox and Southeast Asia research report
- Online marketing reports and surveys
- Speeches around the next billion users
- “Things you don’t necessarily know about Indonesia”. A book written by a Taiwanese who married an Indonesian husband
We’ve also conducted several online surveys to get a first peek at the Indonesian user needs. Some of our top preliminary findings regarding the factors for choosing their current browser included ease of use, fast page loading, being lightweight, and being a default install alongside the phone.
The other questions we’ve asked was about the features they find most useful. The results are: saving downloaded items to SD card, easy to clear cookies and history, sharing downloaded content without using data, night mode, reminder of the data you have left, and so on.
Off to Indonesia
Indonesia is an emerging country that is constantly growing and changing. The city is mixed with modern skyscrapers and traditional neighborhoods hidden in small alleys that locals call kampung. You can feel the energy of the city as the streets are always filled with busy cars, buses and scooters. New buildings are under construction, and tens and hundreds of malls are always full of people.
On the streets of Jakarta, I was really surprised to see a lot of motorcycle riders wearing the same coat and helmet with a logo on it. They are GO-Jek and Grab rider, and similar to Uber, it is a transportation taxi service. But instead of taking a car, you sit behind a motorcycle rider to travel around the city. Most people pay the driver with cash or top-up points instead of a credit card. This is quite different from how we are costumed to but has became something that is deeply rooted in their daily life.
During the 2 weeks in Indonesia, the team with Ruby & Bram leading the effort (plus 3 UX designers and 1 Product Manager) conducted 10 home interviews, 8 user testing in Mozilla community space in Jakarta and 6 sessions of street intercepts. We also did some field research like buying phones and sim cards, going to Bandung to visit a hackerspace, and even got a chance to visit and conduct 3 sessions in a school with students from 9~12th grades with the help of a teacher there who happens to be a community member.
There’s a lot of research findings and Ruby is going to share out a detailed report later, but here is a summary of the findings related to mobile browser:
Most people knew an app from friends, relatives or tech experts.
They acquire apps not only through Google Play Store but also from sideloading through retailers when you purchase a phone or get it from friends by transferring APK via apps like ShareIt.
Furthermore, people just use whatever browser that is pre-installed on their phone, and a second browser is usually used as a backup when some websites can’t be opened using the primary browser or in needs of a specific feature like faster downloading.
On top of that, web page loading speed is the most important thing when they compare between different browsers.
They care about application size since their phone has limited storage space and they will uninstall apps that take up too much storage.
And because people have limited phone storage space; therefore, almost everyone buys an SD card and insert it into their phone to expand the phone storage.
When asked, Indonesian will select data saving as an important thing to them, but they don’t seem to be using those data saving features in the app. Instead, they care more about storage saving in comparison.
System screenshot is the most used method for them to save a web page because it is straightforward and universal.
Moreover, we observed lots of people took multiple screenshots to save an entire web page like shopping site and Instagram post.
Last but not least, privacy doesn’t mean protection against tech giants like Google, Microsoft or even government, but means personal data or files protected against friends, relatives or hackers. Notifications, surprisingly are not viewed as an annoyance, and they actually like receiving them.
What’s next?
Some of the research results were fed into the design of Firefox Rocket, a browser tailor-made for Indonesia which just got launched on November 7th. We are eager to see if Indonesians like it and how they interact with it. So stay tuned for more~
