In my experience working with low education, low technology users across African countries, Zambia, Malawi, Kenya, Ethiopia, and Nigeria one of the challenges of pushing out new technologies has always been adoption. The products developed must be both adaptable and workable for these users.

My past experience led me to interact with a wide range of users across Africa, discussing how the different technologies will be able to change the way they receive and consume information. We worked extensively with small-holder farmers and agro-dealers, designing, testing, and launching products that are both usable, practical, and adaptable.

We engaged heavily in interviews, focused group discussions with these users showing them different design models created from UX tools such as UX-Pin, sometimes we used paper designs. Trying to understand what is important to them and how the information flow should look like for them. The most important ones coming up 1st. You will be surprised to discover that a simple change in how the information appears in the design would heavily influence the way a user views and interacts with products.

Most of these kinds of interactions with users were mostly face-to-face, the discussions happened guided by a well-designed research questionnaire. Even after the products were ready to be used by shop owners or field teams, training took place face to face. This involved so much traveling for me. I worked for 3 departments at the time, technology as a user acceptance tester and a product owner for some of the products, for the operations team as a trainer and led most of the product launches, for the product team, I worked as a process designer and project manager. I would wear all these hats at different times! The QA lead at the time nicknamed me “bug hunter” this was really based on my ability to unearth different bugs on our products. From where you sit in the team, that can be a good thing or a bad thing!

About 4 years and I had done what I could to impact the smallholder farmers in Africa by bringing both information closer to them and getting them enrolled in innovative insurance that is bundled with what they need. I bet that there is more that is to be done in this space. Then I transitioned out to work for a Pay-Go Solar company. The transition was natural for me as I was dealing with almost the same kind of users, field agents, and off-grid population which utilized the solar products. These are really the same user groups if you think about it, most farmers live in off-grid areas (areas without electricity). To make it more interesting, I am working mostly in Kenya and Zambia.

Most of my training for new products, USSD, Mobile applications, SMS have always been face to face through the Trainer of trainers model. I would sit down with a team of agents/supervisors and train them, they would later go into the field and train the other users. After which we could run some post-training surveys to access the understanding of the last user in the model. These methods worked at the time, the adoption rate of our products among the target group was decent as we provided incentives to these users to do specific tasks such as registering end-users (farmers) or referring them to take part in the programs we supported at the time.

Fast forward to 2020! We had just run our training for our initial pilot on our field force mobile app among our field teams in 2 regions in Kenya, this was done in early this year. The 1st case of COVID 19 in Kenya was reported on the 13th March, at the time, the government gave some regulations to be followed and people were generally allowed to go to the offices. Most of the cases reported immediately after that were mostly from international travelers coming into the country. Later that month counties such as Nairobi and Mombasa cut off from the rest of the country as the government started implementing measures to control the spread of the virus. Another measure that directly impacted my work was the banning of meetings for more than 15 people, and the closure of hotels.

All the fundamentals parts of a product training or launch were now not accessible, traveling was not possible, and meetings were also not possible.

Fortunately, our team was already looking into a training platform for our field user base (https://app.learn.ink/). We quickly jumped into the conversation, as a plan to continue with our training. The training by the learn ink team was straight forward and we were able to create test and launch training to our users within a month.

This platform is known as Learn Ink, it is designed to provide users with content anywhere at any time. The web users would put together the training online on a very simple to use UI, a link created a shared with the target users. One unique strength of this platform is that it provides a web user with the ability to set up a discussion format in a training session between a teacher and a student. In this case, the organization becomes the teacher while the user becomes the student. The user must only press next to go through the training, where a teacher and a student are having a conversation about the subject matter. From time to time, the user is engaged by allowing them to provide answers to survey questions on the go within the training.

Example of a typical training

Teacher; Hello Agro Dealer and welcome!

Student: Hello, thank you. What am I going to learn today?

Teacher: We are going to teach you about the best practices for selling!

Student: Great, tell me more!

Teacher: Before we start! Please tell us some of the challenges you face while selling?

a)    Getting walk-in customers

b)   Following up with prospects

c)    Convincing customers that my product is the best

d)   Other- specify

Here the user is prompted to select any of the options

Teacher: Brilliant! Today you will learn about all these!

Student: …….

The conversation keeps going. In the meantime the survey answers are saved in the background per user, this gives an opportunity for the organization to check this later to see which options most of the users selected, and the training materials can be updated to fit the specific topic or concern raised by most users.

Another impressive feature of Learn Ink is the ability to ask questions or quizzes to the users after they have gone through the course. There are also some cool emojis to keep the training very interesting. The questions are designed to test the understanding of the users. Remember we did this before through the call center and it came with many challenges like a user not willing to answer or not being able to take the calls. The biggest challenge is also being able to reach these users on the phone, the answer rates are always around ~ 50%. One of the greatest mysteries to me has always been “what do these users do with their phones immediately they leave where you met them” That is a discussion for another day!

The questions after the course enable the organization to gauge the understanding of the users. The great thing about this is that the questions have correct answers pre-programmed into them. When a user gets a question wrong, the pop up will show the right answer and allow them to move to the next question. If they get the correct answer, they will get a congratulation note which also comes packed with interesting sounds and emojis.

Another amazing feature is that each user’s accuracy in answering these questions is recorded and accessible to the organization. The organization can use this to both access the success and understanding of the training and arrange for more targeted training for users that did not do so well.

After the training, a certificate for the course is offered for the user, this may look like a small thing but the response from the users shows it to be big. The instant gratification feeling and the appeal of accomplishment has pushed the user to complete the training and get the certificate, which the share instantly on WhatsApp groups. We have provided them with a platform for bragging! It will surprise you how many of these certificates are shared immediately when we push out a new course. This has also driven behavior to always take the next new course.

Moving forward, I do not think the product training space will be the same, the users will keep learning new things over this period through platforms like learn ink and this may be the big shift in the user learning. We wait to see it! I personally will adopt this new way of user engagement. Just a link and you can train, interact, engage, and get feedback from your user base!