Digital Landscape Myanmar
Research Objective
From online to offline, offline to online what are the barriers, limitations that stop people to access the Internet?
From this project we’d like to learn how do people overcome the barrier and how their attitude toward digital security & privacy.
In monk school we found a group of migrant novice students, their phone is usually lower ended, and they have to rely on donation to buy top-up credits.
Project scope
Timeline :
18 days - Fieldwork,
12 days - Deliverable
2 Cities: Yangon, Mandalay
42 Street intercepts
12 In-home interviews
My Responsibilities
Research planning
Photograph
Analysis & Synthesis
Deliverable workshop planning
Workshop Facilitation
Fixer alignment, communication
Street Intercept
Observation & Insights
1.Desire to have control over data consumption
User has a huge desire to overcome challenges to get on the Internet with lower cost, but the experience takes so much cognitive effort, and to save data never being an easy task. Between the interview, we saw they kept turning on and off their data while we asked for DEMO, or skipped videos on Facebook to save data.
When we asked participant to search a melon in Burmese dishes, she typed in Burmese in search bar in Facebook.
3.Data is the new currency
Imbalanced data resources increased collective offline-sharing and created a new social structure and hierarchy. We found file exchange offline become an unique social interaction happening in tea house- people trade videos, songs, via offline tools like Zapya.
4. Different privacies
We observed young adults struggled with their phones being borrowed and their conversation, photos being viewed by relatives. We also observed a girl hides photos of handsome boys into secret folders.
In Myanmar, though each family member has their own phone, their phone is still considered a sharing asset in the family. Privacy is the physical challenge, culturally it's hard to reject friends and family from access their personal phone contents.
Summer in Mandalay, sometimes it reaches up to 40 degree Celsius, many users have to stop using their phone to prevent phone crashes due to overheating.
2.Fear of unknown cost
Users fear about unknown cost and uncertainty when they are online, the waiting circles adding on anxiety of internet cost - The Facebook infinite scroll design reduces a lot of anxiety compare to browser page by page loading design.
“Clicking on links will use more data than browsing Facebook. It takes you to more pages and more links you need to click on.
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We observed no matter how low their phone capacities is, they all have a religious application in their phone.
A father of a family uses messy theme to hide his facebook from whoever borrow his phone.
Kids were playing game in monastery.
workshop & persona
The raw data was synthesized into 4 types of personas to generate ideas and increased stakeholders’ awareness. We used agile methods to run a workshop, participants were asked to role play a researcher to ask questions. This reduces the data volume and makes it playful for participants to absorb new knowledge.
This research piece and behavioral insights have transformed into new product concepts and strategy in Firefox Lite new features.
Project contributor
Design manager - Harly Hsu
Designer - Miller Huang
Video - Miller Huang
Fixer - Koko Mung
Researcher - Ricky Yu, Amy Huang
