Creating a app for low-income people what I've learned

The answer is simple: to create a technology product for low-income people, it's not that simple. The author of this article, Ciara Byrne, from the nonprofit organization significance Labs, has created a domestic service application Neatstreak. I was lost in the Bronx, the famous slum of New York, USA. It was my first week as a non-profit organization significance Labs staff, and my job was to create a technology product for families with a U.S. income of less than 25000 dollars a year. In 2013, 45.3 million people in the United States lived below the poverty line, with an average annual income of $23834 (four households). One of my colleagues and I spent one hours doing a user survey on the subway. There are no coffee shops, no shops, only a few snack spots. Taxis are not here, and we even look at Google Maps and miss this place. We, from the technological world, were aghast at the time--technology was useless here. In a way, technology fails in the face of low-income people, and developers do not develop applications for this group. Marketers also ignore them. In significance Labs, I learned a lot about the living conditions of low-income Americans, the limitations of their use of technology, and the limitations of my own existence. What users need-make up for scarcity, stupidity this week we interviewed a lot of people in the slums of New York. There was a young father who was a teaching assistant at a school in Brownsville. There was also an illegal Mexican immigrant who worked for 25 years as a nanny and cleaner, and when I asked her what her ideal job was, she replied: computer programmer. Our team eventually launched the product called Neatstreak, targeted at the domestic cleaning workers this group. They are difficult to access to perfect financial services systems, they are old Andro users, families of the first college students, and food coupon applicants. These people are busy with their lives every day, playing several jobs. They face inequality, not just income inequality, but also information and opportunities. In fact, my income as a freelance writer is sometimes less than some of my interviews. But I have access to resources such as education and social capital that they do not have. In these places, the first generation of college graduates is only 10%, and they are not receiving the same college education as other peers. Low income also means the scarcity of these things: rights, information, respect, opportunity, time, health, safety, and even sleep. And our job is to create some technology for these people to make up for at least one of the missing things. That's what they need. Your users don't trust you. Years ago, I interviewed a famous Mexican investor named Álvaro Rodríguez Arregui, who said that investors must be clear about the motives of their investments: do you want to make something good or just feelFeel good? " What do you mean? For example, you can easily feel good by feeding the starving children in Sudan, but you are not helping them solve any problems. While the latter is business, business is complex and you need to make tough decisions about N. I think that's the point. I often feel very nervous because I have to make a lot of difficult decisions. In addition, we are not understood, people do not understand why we want to create technology products for servants and cleaners. Your users do not understand you, this is a very sad thing, we significance Labs many colleagues are abandoned high income, and even came to this, but sad to find we are not trusted by potential users, our products are not recognized by them. We build the application Neatstreak, let the domestic staff and the employer through our platform to establish the connection. We tested a lot of versions and asked a lot of domestic staff for advice and advice, and they were happy to be asked about their work, even though they sometimes didn't understand what we were going to do. However, it is difficult to persuade cleaners and other domestic workers to come and help us with our tests, even though we pay them 25 dollars an hour, a much higher price than they normally pay at work. They don't trust us, they don't believe it's possible to have such a good thing. " However, the reality is that you are facing low-income people, they have all kinds of legitimate reasons not to believe you, and we have to do is to continue efforts. Since the choice of this group, the non-profit nature of the work, we can only adhere to, believe that we do things will eventually reflect its meaning. The fallacy of smart phones The biggest fallacy I've heard about smartphones is that the poor have no smartphones. In fact, the proportion of low-income people who use mobile phones as Internet portals is even greater than that of the overall Americans. According to a Pew survey in 2013, 45% of people who earn 30,000 dollars a year have a mobile phone as the main internet portal, compared with 27% of those who earn more than 75,000 dollars a week. Low-income people are more reliant on mobile phones for online demand. Significance Labs recently conducted a survey of 1900 smartphone users in New York, with annual revenues below $50,000 trillion. The results show that 87% of mobile phone users have smartphones, mostly Android phones. 25% of respondents had 2 mobile phones, mostly a smartphone, a function machine. The respondents installed an average of 6-7 applications on each handset, and about 1/3 per cent of respondents had downloaded paid apps. It is also important to be aware of the consumer habits of your user base. The user's pain point has a home economics officer who helps us test, saying his biggest problem is not knowing how to bargain with his employer, he said, and it was embarrassing to communicate with clients. When it comes to money, I can't find the normal way to communicate with them--a less stressful way. "But now he realizes the use of nThe benefits of Eatstreak. On this platform, they can enter into an agreement with the employer: A list of what needs to be done to clean up and pay, to avoid the embarrassment of talking about money and many unnecessary misunderstandings and even language. Technical solutions can't make you a permanent technician is used to solve problems. But it's not everything. My first interview was with a 21-year-old father who had two children and what he really needed was a steady job to support his family. But no app can help him solve the problem in 3 months. Another problem is the dilemma of product influence and scale. Should we solve a small problem for the public or solve a big problem for the small audience? We choose the former because the latter is not our ability. All we can do is use technology to help these people get more breathing space. For example, my colleague Jimmy Chen, who developed an app called Easyfoodstamps, helped low-income people apply for food vouchers and saved them the time to queue for vouchers at the relief office. Don't be naïve when it comes to providing them with technical solutions. You have to understand their backgrounds, such as cleaners who prefer to pay in cash; they mostly use text messaging; sometimes they don't want to disclose their identities online, especially illegal immigrants. Build your product from this information. Next, in some ways, technology has exacerbated social inequalities. Tech companies should think about how to make up for this. I believe that businesses can build sustainable businesses by providing services to low-income people. We speculate that there are 20 million families in the United States who need the services of domestic workers, and this number is already huge. The Mexican investor I mentioned above, who invested in a start-up called Finestrella, a company that was very successful, developed an algorithm to help low-income people assess credit. Two VC companies from Silicon Valley, Storm Ventures and Bay Partnership, also invested in the company. Perhaps the best long-term solution is to nurture a younger generation of low-income people to build their own businesses and let them develop their own solutions. But this is easier said than done. Because most of them live a precarious life, all day for survival, the risk of participation in entrepreneurship is definitely not what they want. But the good news is that there are always people struggling in the cracks and they want to live a different life. Many of the housekeeping people I know are now entrepreneurs. Our office cleaner Jason, who set up a business and employs five or six employees, is doing a good job.