Rethinking Design of Digital Platforms for Emergent Users: Findings from a Study with Rural Indian Farmers

With increasing penetration of low cost smartphones and affordable data plans in developing countries like India, there is a definite potential that the benefits of access to information can reach a wider audience. However, researchers have also been cognizant that many from this segment are first time users of digital technology and are limited by low text-literacy and low capability to handle and use digital platforms. The established norms of application building for a more tech-savvy and text-literate audience might need to be revisited. We conduct detailed interviews in an ecologically valid setting with 20 farmers from rural Maharashtra and Chhattisgarh to understand the information seeking behaviour and culture of digital platform usage among these populations. Through these interviews we are able to distill some very salient characteristics of the new Internet users and draw a broad set of guidelines for designing information systems for these users. We find the constructs of trust, external invisibility, peers and family play a very important role in the uptake of digital platforms in addition to the accessibility features of text-free design.