FASTPANEL

Keynote: The African Bill Gates leaves Tech4Africa speechless

By: Heidi Schneigansz

Herman Chinery-Hesse has a remarkable story. He is one of those people that makes you feel like you can do anything with nothing. That’s because Herman believes in African Style Solutions for uniquely African problems. Europe and American don’t have power failures and bandwidth problems, so Africans can’t copy First World solutions and expect them to work here.

After returning to Ghana from America, a young Herman thought he was going to go into manufacturing. The problem was, the only asset he had was an old PC. He had no capital, no connections and no infrastructure to build a factory. However, he soon realised that his PC “was a factory, it could manufacture software.”

Herman started SOFTribe in 1991 after a bet with friends when out at a nightclub that he could get a job in unemployment-riddled Ghana within three days. That Monday, he was building software for a travel agency; in front of the client, on the one computer they had in the building. Soon, SOFTribe was the biggest IT Company in Ghana and quickly expanded into other countries.

It wasn’t all smooth sailing though, the advent of the Internet nearly closed him down. His clients were insisting on central web-based software, dictated by their European Head Offices, so SOFTribe had to reinvent themselves. They knew that the majority of the economic growth was coming from SMEs, so Herman started BlackStarLine, a company that incubated a revolutionary eCommerce platform. ShopAfrica53 is a virtual shopping mall, allowing vendors a space to sell their products on a global scale. But the really special thing about ShopAfrica53 is the fact that it plans to push intra-Africa trade, selling African goods to Africans who do not necessarily have access to large malls.

However, the platform is a labour of love that has taken years to perfect, so Herman had to roll out interim products that would keep his business alive. One such product line was barcoded cards that allowed delegates access into one of Ghana’s largest trade shows, which meant the show made profit on entry for the first time ever, over 500%! It wasn’t long before the cards were being used for concerts, conference and shows all over Africa.

That was just the beginning. BSL’s next innovation was ‘Quickie’, instant ‘on-demand’ insurance through scratch cards and the cell networks, which allow you to SMS a code to switch your policy on and off. This sort of technology would never work in the developed world but revolutionises insurance in Africa.

When asked his secret, Herman says “I used to be a techie but these days, I like to think like an end user. Business is not just a programmer’s game. You should always look at the client experience, or your products will fail.”

The audience was spellbound and I left the room inspired and proud to be an African. Herman says it best: “The African unity that I see isn’t just a philosophy, it unites with business… remember, borders become irrelevant in the Cloud.”

March of the UX Designers

By: Roger Hislop

Anyone who was at Tech4Africa in 2010 will remember ClearLeft’s Andy Budd and his awesome presentation on user experience design. He drew the parallels between a great retail store and a great website design, and how this often fails by designers having the wrong departure point. His colleagues Cennydd (pronounced Kenneth if you were wondering) Bowles and James Box took to the Tech4Africa stage again this year, talking to a packed room.

These two tag-teamed each other, talking about UX design, but focusing less on the gee-whiz concepts and more on process and techniques.

They started with the old UX ra-ra – UX is now all-important, the most successful products of today have been designed with superior user experiences: the age of competing on features is over. It’s user experience, user experience, user experience.

They then traced the path of UX design from the very first computers – from ENIAC and the old punch-card machines. In this world, operators had to learn the language of the machine. As computers have got more powerful and the interface can be abstracted, controls are no longer mapped to the guts of the device.

Now, it’s about huggable technology. In books like The Brand Gap we can see that these are concepts marketers have understood for a long time: commercial success comes from bridging the distance between expectations and experience, between assumption and real life. This is the role of the modern UX pro.

In UX the thinking and discipline has become clearer and more formalised, with a hierarchy of needs that moves from the task-led beginnings, starting with something being functional, then useful, then reliable, then usable, then convenient, then pleasurable, and finally meaningful. The end-goal being to address the experience, not what the user may have wanted to achieve.

Bowles talked about experience design as a profession – one which is described by this umbrella term that stretches over a range of disciplines from info architecture, to research, to usability studies and more.

The key to good user experience design, said the Clearleft twosome, is that it’s not a checkbox to be ticked, it needs to be integrated into every part of the process right from initial product strategy to final release. It’s becoming a clear discipline, with career paths and levels of seniority as companies start to build UX into their business structures.

The presentation looked at a four-step process:

Step 1: Design research

Begin with a pause… understand the people who will use it. This part can easily lead to an immediate taking of the wrong tack. Design research is not about listening to a wish list of features from user focus groups and feedback forms. They most vital part is understanding user behaviours, their problems, how they conceive of and understand these problems – and how can we (as UX professionals) solve them.

Their key tips were:

– Not look at market research as core, rather design research around quite specific, personal, and one-on-one interactions with possible users.

– Conduct ‘expert reviews’ – using experienced pros that evaluate against tested design principles (made for humans, forgiving, accessible, self evident, predictable, efficient, trustworthy), and doing competitive analysis (the risk here is significant, to get hung up on what competitors are doing and everyone chase their tails, not innovating)

– Look at analytics closely – although again they warn against getting hung up on analytics just because it’s ‘hard data’. Analytics tells you WHAT people are doing, not WHY. It’s important when studying analytics to talk to people what they were doing (maybe they took a path to a page because they couldn’t find another way, not because they preferred it!)

Research methods recommended

– Interviews (one-on-one)

– Focus groups (as usual with focus groups beware of danger of groupthink, or a dominant individual driving the discussion)

– Questionnaires

– Diary studies (where people record their interactions with a system over a period)

– The quick and dirty corridor tests (stick your head out the office, grab someone walking down the corridor and stick them in front of your new design, and watch them use it)

Once you’ve done your research, you need to produce some outputs – normally a report. The speakers were quite anti the normal practice of producing a couple of slides with some nice charts of the numbers, as this is often not useful when resolving design disagreements.

They suggest rather using a persona (a fictitious user that represents a user group). It’s a lot easier to design for a person than for a heap of data, they say, and each persona acts as a common reference point that is clear and intuitive.

Reports can include the personas, and they maybe even extend into comics and storyboards that show how the personas would integrate your system with their life – the idea is to build insights into a broad view of the user behaviour.

Step 2: Generate Ideas

Once this research has been done, it’s time to generate ideas.

You’re all excited, you have lots of information, and even understand your users. The temptation is to jump in and start to design right away.

No, say Bowles and Box. As in the classic tome on chess strategy, “when you see a good move, look for a better one”. You need to explore the possibility space. At this point you can throw many ideas at the wall to see what sticks – risks are low, nothing to change, nothing to hold on to.

If you jump in and start designing immediately, there is a temptation to fixate on obvious solutions.

To generate ideas, there are some conceptual tools that can help. Two good classic books in this area are the advertising industry standby, “A Technique For Producing Ideas” by James Young, and Edward de Bono’s “Six Thinking Hats”.

They are big fans of sketching – taking a koki pen and piece of paper and scribbling down ideas and layouts. It’s quick and easy, says Box, and importantly you don’t get attached to them.

Sketches can also be posted up onto a sketch board – basically a big board with rough maps, sketches and mock-ups pinned up and arranged in some kind of rough order. Sketch boards encourages stand-up communication – trying to resolve design disputes via email is often a giant, slow fail. The other advantages of sketch boards in the ideas generation phase is that they are clearly not finished, so it invites input.

Step 3: Detailed design

Historical UX designers and visual designers worked separately. In modern development this is increasingly seeing this as undesirable – with famous architect Frank Lloyd Wright’s adage, “You can fix it on the drawing board with an eraser, or onsite with a sledgehammer”.

This is where all the work is turned into something concrete, the dreaded ‘deliverables’, the risk that management pressure and corporate culture can fetishize these deliverables into an orgy of reports and planning.

Some of the types of deliverables include logic maps, site maps, storyboards (which are better for a more interactive site), and wire frames – although these make it difficult to capture something really interactive, so instead you may need a prototype.

For very top-down design management, there would also need to be a functional spec – great to keep middle managers and procurement departments happy, but in trying to describe how every function works they often end up being milestones that document the chasing of a moving target.

Step 4: Testing and iteration

Finally: get feedback, and test the ideas on a real site. Say the UXtabulous twosome, “You need to accept that first attempt will not be right.” There is certain emotional baggage around this that you need to keep an eye out for: Egoless vs Genius design. A bad designer will cling to concepts too long, especially if they think they’re genius.

An example of truly successful Genius design that’s often held up is Apple – although, says Box, the genius is probably more that they’re just really good at making sure we didn’t hear about all the design iteration.

Usability testing should include all stakeholders – and a structured critique is often missing from design process. This means user feedback, analytics, and even A/B testing. A risk in formalising testing in a clumsy way is codifying incorrect assumptions simply to be able to check the “tested” box.

You can compare Summative vs. Formative testing. In Summative testing you answer the question “does this work”. If the answer is no, there may be pressure to ignore or misinterpret this testing, as the cost of changes at the end is quite high. Compare this to the Formative testing, where you “test early, test often” to inform the design process.

The presentation touched briefly on some testing software, such as Clearleft’s own cheap’n’chearful Silverback, or something like Morae.

Their final bit of advice is to look to improve, not perfect, in the testing stage. Perfection is not possible, and this is the real world.

Where is UX design heading?

To wrap up, the two talked about where UX design is heading. There is a (somewhat debatable) quote that “Our medium is not technology, it’s behaviour”. More interesting was the concept that “behaviour is a function of a person AND his/her environment”, that how someone acts changes with context.

There is interesting work being done in choice architecture – it has become clear that decisions can be deeply influenced by the choices that we are presented with, and how they are presented. A lot of the work UX people do is around changing behaviour, which requires understanding the psychology of users.

A final nugget of wisdom is that good design is less about UX tactics, and more about what we can do to make their lives better. In the modern world this means there is a growing focus on cross-channel UX, where there may be a native mobile app, a mobi site and a full site, all performing slightly different functions for the user. The modern UX designer has to make sure these are all consistent, but make the best use of each device – and also synch with real world stuff like the physical presence (retail stores, etc).

Social media goes mainstream in SA

By: Michal Wronski and Arthur Goldstuck

South Africans have embraced social media as a core pillar of Internet activity in this country, along with e-mail, news and banking. MXit and Facebook lead the way in user numbers, while Twitter has seen the most dramatic growth in social networking in the past year, and BlackBerry Messenger is the fastest growing network in the second half of 2011.

These are among the key findings of a new study released today by Fuseware and World Wide Worx, entitled South African Social Media Landscape 2011.

“The question of how many South Africans use each of the major social networks comes up so often, it became a priority for us to pin down the numbers,” says Michal Wronski, Managing Director of information analysts Fuseware and co-author of the report. “The data was collected through a combination of Fuseware’s analysis of social network databases, information provided directly by social networks, and World Wide Worx’s consumer market research.”

An analysis of Fuseware’s extensive database of Twitter usage, in conjunction with World Wide Worx’s consumer market research, shows that there were 1,1-million Twitter users in South Africa in mid-2011. This is a 20-fold increase in a little more than a year.

“One of the drivers of growth of Twitter is the media obsession with the network,” says report co-author Arthur Goldstuck, managing director of World Wide Worx. “Most radio and TV personalities with large audiences are engaged in intensive campaigns to drive their listeners and viewers to both Twitter and Facebook. The former, coming off a very low base, is therefore seeing the greatest growth.”

As in the global environment, not all Twitter users are active users, with only 40% tweeting, but probably as many simply watching, following and using it as a breaking news service.

MXit remains the most popular social network in South Africa, with approximately 10-million active users. Its demographic mix runs counter to the popular media image of MXit as a teen-dominated environment. No less than 76% of the male user base of MXit and 73% of female users are aged 18 or over.

A surprising finding emerged from analysis of Facebook data. Of approximately 4.2-million Facebook users in South Africa by August 2011, only 3.2 million had visited the site in the year-to-date.

“This is partly a factor of many users moving on once the novelty of the site had worn off, as well as a result of the fickle nature of the youth market,” says Wronski. “Once BBM picked up significant traction in private schools, for example, many teenagers who had previously flocked to Facebook, opted for BBM’s greater immediacy.”

While LinkedIn, aimed at professional users, also reached the 1,1-million mark, it came off a far higher base – but still saw 83% growth of South African users from 2010 to 2011. Of these, 112 000 or 10% are business owners.

Consumer research analysed in the report revealed that future intention of usage of most social networks is strongly related to age. The younger the user, the greater the intention of usage.

“This is only one of many micro-trends shaping social networking,” says Goldstuck. “MXit, Facebook and BBM statistics illustrate, for example, that as social networks become more mainstream, their penetration within all age ranges deepens. This, in turn, will result in the continual flattening of the age curve as social networks mature.”

Tech4Africa launches Innovation Award

We’re now calling for entries to our inaugural Tech4Africa Innovation Award. Designed to recognise homegrown innovation and further inspire the industry to develop global solutions to uniquely African challenges, this prestigious award is open to individuals and companies alike.

“The Tech4Africa Innovation Award is another mechanism for us to realise our goal to engage, inspire, enable and innovate,” said Gareth Knight, MD of Tech4Africa. “Africa has produced some incredible innovations to address problems that are considered unique, although these solutions often find traction around the globe”. “We want to recognise a single person or company that has developed something that has changed the lives of people in Africa. A great number of successful innovations emerge every year, yet many slip under the radar and this is something we hope to remedy through this initiative.”

How to apply

The process has been broken down to its bare bones in a bid to make applying as simple and cost-effective as possible. Individuals or companies therefore need only send a single-page synopsis of their product or service, what the innovation is and the level of success or traction that it has attained. The only qualifying criteria are that the innovation must have been in the market for at least one and a half years and have been created by Africans to solve uniquely African challenges. Participants are welcome to nominate themselves or suggest a deserving recipient.

Entries for the Tech4Africa Innovation Award close on 12 September, following which a list of 10 finalists will be drawn up. The winner will be announced at an award ceremony to be held the night of 26 October as a curtain raiser for the two-day conference that starts the following day.
“The judging panel will consist of industry experts, community members and conference partners,” said Gareth Knight. “We are trying to keep the process as open and transparent as possible and are busy concluding the prize details. We have no doubt it will carry a lot of prestige and exposure and enable the winner to use this recognition to drive or develop the innovation further.”

New edition, new ideas

The 2011 Tech4Africa Conference follows last year’s successful launch of the event, which attracted more than 500 developers, marketers, innovators and business executives. Some of the industry’s leading minds gathered for two days to participate in presentations by and discussions with international speakers on the state of web and emerging technology on the continent.
The 2011 edition of Tech4Africa will be hosted at The Forum in Bryanston, Johannesburg from 27 to 28 October. Registration for the conference is open, with full details on the website.

* Photo by whiteafrican (Creative Commons)

5 reasons why Tech4Africa 2011 is the technology event of the year

As we start the second half of 2011, the technology landscape is changing at such a pace that the need to be current and timely is greater than ever. It’s clear that mobile reach will be far greater than the PC, and that apps will be the deciding factor for the market winning device or platform.

It’s not quite the hysteria of 1999, but we are starting to reach a tipping point where most of the worlds population that could be online, are. Perhaps more importantly, the benefit of this connectedness is felt even more in Africa where people who did not have a voice, now do. With that as the foundational plumbing, the usefulness and immediacy of mobile will drive more and more people to consume services, utilise data, and engage socially, which then drives demand for cloud based services accessible anywhere and on any device.

Building on the success of Tech4Africa 2010, we’re back in October 2011, and even better! Our themes for this year are Mobile, Social and Cloud, and through listening to great feedback from the 2010 event, our schedule has changed somewhat to focus on fewer talks with deeper content, and expanded to include relevant events for the African tech industry. These are the highlights that make Tech4Africa 2011 the technology event of the year:

1 – Featuring Josh Spear and Herman Chinery-Hesse as keynote speakers, plus 8 more great international speakers.

2 – African speakers who are experts in their fields will share their experiences about developing tech businesses in Africa.

3 – The Trade Show runs through the duration of the conference, and is an ideal opportunity for African technology businesses to showcase their products and/or services in an environment of buyers, decision makers, journalists, tweeters, bloggers and potential recruits.

4 – Ignite is a startup competition, aimed at giving exposure to the hottest new startups, while introducing them to prospective investors, customers and the media.

5 – Presented to a single winner, the Innovation Award encourages innovation for solving uniquely African problems, whilst also encouraging global thinking. The Award recognises that innovation can be entrepreneurial, as well as intrapreneurial, and so is open to anyone or any company.

It’s through these initiatives and more in the coming years, that we’re delivering on our objectives of Engage, Inspire, Enable, and Innovate. We hope that you can join us at the technology event of the year, running for two full days on the 27th & 28th October, at The Forum, in Bryanston, Johannesburg. To avoid disappointment, book your ticket now.

We’d love to follow you on Twitter too! We’re @t4a

SA cellphone users suddenly smart

A research study released today shows that the cellular habits of South African phone users have evolved dramatically in the past year as smartphones, mobile applications and the mobile Internet entered the mainstream.

The Mobility 2011 research project, conducted by World Wide Worx and backed by First National Bank, reveals that 39% of urban South Africans and 27% of rural users are now browsing the Internet on their phones. The study excludes “deep rural” users, and represents around 20-million South Africans aged 16 and above. This means that at least 6-million South Africans now have Internet access on their phones.

“Approximately 30% of FNB’s 2.6 million Cellphone Banking customer base is in the middle income segment. During the festive period for example, the FNB.Mobi site, which is generally accessed by the tech savvy via the internet on their Cell Phones, attracted high volumes of visitors. Cellphone Banking is becoming the preferred alternative as people across the board are driven by the ‘anywhere, anytime’ concept of banking.” says Ravesh Ramlakan, CEO FNB Cellphone Banking Solutions.

The big winner in terms of sites and services is Mxit, which enjoys the attention of 24% of cellphone users aged 16 and above (29% of urban, 19% of rural users). However, Facebook is catching up fast, reaching 22% of users, and in fact passing Mxit in the urban over-16 market, with 30% reach, versus 13% among rural users.

Twitter will also become a key mobile tool, almost catching up to MXit in the coming year, from a low 6% of cellular users at the end of 2010. The proportion of urban Twitter mobile users is exactly double that of rural users: 8%, against 4%.

“Twitter is the big surprise of the study”, says Arthur Goldstuck, managing director of World Wide Worx. “But it is being pushed so hard by media personalities, its time had to come”.

The most dramatic shift of all, however, is the arrival of e-mail in the rural user-base and its growth among urban users. There has been a substantial shift among the latter, with urban use rising from 10% in 2009 to 27% at the end of 2010. While the percentage growth among rural users is lower, the fact that it was almost non-existent a year before means the 12% penetration reported for 2010 indicates mobile e-mail becoming a mainstream tool across the population.

While cameras, diaries and games continue to dominate the list of features used on phones, FM radio and music players have become part of a mobile “Big Five”. However, there is a significant difference in the features preferred by urban and rural phone users. Three quarters of urban respondents (75%) use their phone cameras, but little more than half of rural respondents (55%). Music players on the phone get the vote of 53% of urban users, versus 36% of rural users. Surprisingly, the gap is reversed when it comes to games on the phone: 54% of urban users enjoy these, compared to 65% of rural users.

The Mobility 2011 project comprises two reports, namely the Mobile Consumer in SA 2011 and the Mobile Internet in SA 2011. It is based on face-to-face interviews with a nationally representative sample of South Africans, conducted towards the end of 2010.

m-Pedigree awarded the Grand Prix NetExplorateur 2011

At the fourth NetExplorateur Forum, the Grand Prix NetExplorateur 2011 was awarded to m-Pedigree. The Ghana-based project uses the mobile phone as a weapon against pharmaceutical counterfeiting with the aim of saving lives.

At UNESCO headquarters, Paris, Eric Besson, French Minister for Industry, Energy and the Digital Economy awarded the Grand Prix NetExplorateur to Bright Simons, founder of m-Pedigree, at a ceremony that also recognised nine winners of NetExplorateur of the Year awards. Every year, the Grand Prix NetExplorateur goes to the world’s best digital innovation.

m-Pedigree: saving lives with just a text message

Created in Ghana and successfully piloted in six African countries to date, the m-Pedigree platform is supported by technological partners such as Hewlett-Packard for IT infrastructure, pharmaceutical laboratories and government bodies. It makes instant authentication of drugs possible. Anyone can send a free text message to m-Pedigree quoting the code on the medicine’s packaging. The system sends back a message saying whether the product is genuine.

Fake medicine kills an estimated 2,000 people a day worldwide, chiefly in Africa and Southeast Asia. In some developing countries, fake medicine accounts for up to 25% of the market according to the WHO.

The NetExplorateur Forum: exclusive insight into the digital revolution

As the culmination of a year’s observation and analysis of the changes in digital society on a global scale, the NetExplorateur Forum was created in 2008. It has become an unmissable event at which 1,500 senior figures from business, politics and the media can grasp the most significant emerging initiatives and the most promising breakthroughs.

Thierry Happe, founder of the NetExplorateur Observatory, commented: “The Grand Prix NetExplorateur 2011 is an exemplary African initiative that delivers an exportable model, because fake medicine is now a global problem.”

The 9 NetExplorateurs of the Year 2011 (in addition to the Grand Prix)

CENSO 2010 (Brazil) The first fully digital national census of almost 200 million people.

HAL (Japan) A robot suit that enhances the muscle strength of people with reduced mobility and helps the human body in the hardest physical tasks.

FLATTR (Sweden) The first voluntary micropayment platform for rewarding the creators of digital content, with no amount too small.

E-SKIN (USA) A synthetic skin that gives robots a sense of touch.

LEWATMANA (Indonesia) A collaborative platform for beating the traffic in Jakarta.

OBAMI (South Africa) Creating a dedicated portal for schools through the social network concept.

NATURAL SECURITY (France) A biometric authentication system making electronic payment easier and safer.

MYTOWN (USA) Turning the real world into a Monopoly board where players can buy their favourite places to win points and deals.

DATASIFT (UK) A system that analyses messages from social media in real time.

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Category: African tech