Hi everyone, I hope you’re all well on this Juneteenth. For those of you outside the US, Juneteenth is an American holiday that recognizes the last day on which enslaved people learned of their liberation at the end of our Civil War in 1865. It’s also the title of an amazing novel by Ralph Ellison (one of the few texts I still remember from college days).
Emancipation Day Celebration in Richmond, Virginia (1905)
Source: University of Chicago News
On the Horizon: New Internet Users & the online experience
In weeks past, I’ve noted that much of the user growth for tech companies (and local peers across the globe) will come from new internet users, particularly in the emerging markets that are projected to drive 90% of global population growth in the next ~10 years. It’s easy to lose sight of this reality while in Silicon Valley—and more broadly while in the United States—where it can feel like the iPhone has been fused into our palms for generations. Device access and connectivity are often taken for granted.
The fact of the matter is that there are many communities across the United States where this is not the reality: rural broadband is notoriously lacking, and many neighborhoods in our cities have a high density of families who do not have connected devices or a reliable internet connection. As many US schools moved to a remote learning paradigm during CV-19, there was a growing realization that lack of internet connectivity (or an enabling device) is a real constraint to education and future economic growth. This is true for communities in thousands of Title 1 schools—schools that qualify for targeted food and funding assistance through a federal program that requires high percentages of children to come from low income families—and in numerous other localities across the country.
I mention this because I think it’s important to realize that new (or nascent) internet users exist within American borders, not just beyond them. Designing for new internet users has an impact in all markets, as over one million people come online each day for the first time in their lives.
Recently, Google’s “Next Billion Users” group worked on an initiative in partnership with IDEO and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to produce a playbook for product leaders thinking about designing with these users in mind. The project is called Designing for Digital Confidence and came from Last Mile Money, a five-year initiative that connects underserved communities to the digital economy. Full disclosure: my last project now sits within this Google org, but I didn’t have anything to do with this initiative and am sharing it only in a personal capacity. Check out the site if you’re interested in seeing the host of resources, tools, and case studies that the team has compiled.
One insight that I’ve found interesting is that many new internet users prefer linear interfaces that are predictable and that clearly prompt the expected actions. Relying on extensive or unconstrained inputs from typing is more problematic. Instead of the “search/filter” paradigm that many “power users” find familiar, a queryless interface that anticipates user needs and presents them with a clear choice of actions is preferable. This feels foreign to someone who has used a search bar in various tools for many years, but makes perfect sense if you consider the ambiguous utility these interfaces have for someone who is just learning to use them. How do you know what’s possible? A specific example of this comes from my last project, Kormo, where we originally designed our entry-level jobs marketplace to highlight a vast array of job choices and asked users to do the heavy lifting of defining their interests. Users ultimately led us to change the paradigm so that we presented a much smaller number of jobs (~10 in a feed) and a simplified taxonomy linking interests to jobs, with ease-of-first-use as the guiding principle.
I’ve been thinking about this preferred user interaction in the context of TikTok, whose recommendation algorithm and user experience has been the subject of much commentary. The low friction onboarding into TikTok, and the perception that the app simply understands your desires, is one of its chief value propositions. Sarah Perez from Tech Crunch recently wrote an article explaining how the TikTok “For You” feed works, tuning its sense of each user based on their interactions with content. I’d be remiss if I didn’t note that this is exactly the type of content recommendation algorithm that has been cited as contributing to the “filter bubble” phenomenon, as Perez notes; TikTok’s solution seems to be introducing random videos to introduce “diversity” into a user’s feed. Yet the intangible magic of TikTok also comes from this recommendation paradigm, and from the immediacy with which a user is greeted by appealing content.
I can’t help but feel that this “push” content dynamic is part of what draws users who are otherwise exhausted by having to “pull” information from various sources. We’ve all heard the Netflix joke: our favorite show on Netflix is browsing Netflix. I think that the kernel of truth is that we’re often overwhelmed by the paradox of choice that comes from interfaces that expect us to know what we want. Recently, a friend commented to me that they wished they had a television that only had one channel, with two inputs: “Next” and “Play Again.” His view was that the serendipity of content discovery has been lost; how often do we happen upon a piece of content that wasn’t algorithmically curated for us?
In this vein, I discovered ForeignRap and ReverbRap (a shameless rip-off thereof). What I love about these sites is the near-retro simplicity of the interface: just press your space bar and see what plays next. The controls are bare-bones and well-designed, but the most remarkable aspect to me was the cognitive relief that comes from not having to choose what you want to hear next and not knowing where you might land. Check it out and just be warned that nearly all Slovakian hip hop is very, very bad.
Boomerang: stories from weeks past
Jio x1000: Pretty convinced at this point that India’s Reliance Jio Platforms continues to raise money purely so that I have something to write about each week. I’m grateful, though you might not be! In summary, TPG is adding $600M, L Catterton is pitching in a measly $250M, and the Saudis are turning a few hours of oil revenue into a $1.5bn investment (Tech Crunch). Jio has raised over $15bn in the past couple of months, which is equivalent to roughly 25% of the company. It is projected to have 500M customers within 3 years, and 50% marketshare by 2025. It’s good to be Jio.
This kind of scale gives Jio the ability to do things like build its own authentication system (Gadgets360) called SecureID, which introduces cross-product login functionality that Apple, Facebook, Google, and others have built in the past.
However, this kind of scale has also attracted attention from India’s Competition Commission, a body that is now reviewing the initial Facebook investment in Jio (Tech Crunch). It’ll be interesting to follow where this goes.
What$app Pay gets Reals: That is absolutely the best (only) Brazilian currency joke I’ve ever made. Anyway, Whatsapp officially launched its payments product in Brazil (Financial Times). Peer-to-peer payments for Whatsapp’s 120M Brazilian monthly active users are free, while merchant transactions incur a 3.99% processing fee.
Grab’s wild ride: Last week, I mentioned Grab as Gojek’s primary competition in Southeast Asia. The Singapore-based ride-hailing company has attempted to diversify into a super-app, but has reportedly faced struggles over the past few months, and just announced layoffs of 5% of their workforce (Jakarta Post). This makes me wonder whether we will see additional consolidation in the ride-hailing sector in Southeast Asia. Because of the byzantine corporate structures used by these firms—where vertical business units in payments, streaming media, food delivery, etc are often self-contained entities—there are a number of intriguing possibilities for creative recombination.
The Sound of Protest in 2020: REDEF has curated a hub highlighting articles and playlists centered on a theme of American protest. For most of the 2000s, it has been popular to ask where all the protest music has gone and to compare our era unfavorably to the prolific protest music canon from the 1960s-1970s. The amount of content on this site shows that the reality is quite different.
Zoom & Cameo: We’ve talked in the past about how artists are finding new ways to monetize their time while stuck at home. Cameo, a US startup that allows you to buy personalized messages from celebs, has introduced a new “Book on Zoom" feature. You can do essential, life-affirming things like spend $15k on 10 minutes with Jeremy Piven. I would say that this deepens my ambivalence about 2020.
For your ears only
Song Exploder’s latest episode focuses on Mobb Deep (Queensbridge’s finest, with all due respect to His Eminence Ron Artest) and “Shook Ones, Pt. II,” arguably their most famous song and one of the most recognizable rap beats of all-time. I have this song to thank for keeping me awake on many early-morning commutes on the 101. In this episode, Havoc (half of the duo), tells the story of its production. Whether or not you listen to the full podcast, give the record a spin and travel back to 1995.
In case you’re just waking up and not yet spiritually prepared for Mobb Deep, I’d strongly recommend Moses Sumney’s latest album: grae. I don’t really know how to describe this incredible album, except to say that I tried to use it as background music while making dinner and ended up listening to it twice in a row while my food burned to a crisp.
See you next week.
N