Table 2

Ten learnings from the prototype testing

1.Household phones were rarely in the hands of pregnant women and mothers. They were on the move—from one person’s hand to another person’s pocket in the joint family — all day long.
2.Any mobile service for mothers needed to speak to fathers, because they controlled women’s access to phones and vetted calls from unknown numbers.
3.Low literate users with few digital skills struggled with long IVR menus and could not use hierarchical IVR menus at all. They found it easier to use linear IVR navigation.
4.In oral communities, fictional narrators needed to be created to humanise the digital experience and increase user comfort and engagement.
5.An empathetic voice of authority was required to convince fathers to take health advice seriously, and a fictional doctor character had huge appeal in resource-poor communities without easy access to doctors.
6.A dictionary of common health terms was created and iteratively tested to identify vocabulary and phrases that were comprehendible by the majority of users.
7.Women in media dark communities with little education struggled to understand content that communicated too much information during one call.
8.Metaphors and analogies were challenging to understand and should be avoided.
9.Repetition of information was key—both during a call and in subsequent calls to enhance recall.
10.Content delivered via mobile needed to be much shorter than radio, and background music and dialogue impaired comprehension.
  • IVR, interactive voice response.