Mind the Gap

Accord­ing to recent research, the dig­i­tal divide may include peo­ple who are not inter­ested in get­ting online. The impli­ca­tion of this are enor­mous, impact­ing areas like E-government ini­tia­tive. The idea of pro­vid­ing more ser­vices online allows cor­po­ra­tions and gov­ern­ment to reduce costs by encour­ag­ing self ser­vice. How­ever, if a num­ber of peo­ple decide that there is no value in being online, how does one offer them ser­vice? Would prod­ding, in the case of cor­po­ra­tions through increased fees, work? And how would gov­ern­ments, which are sup­posed to offer ser­vices for free (well, almost, since those ser­vices are paid for by tax dol­lars), reduce costs. These are issues that need closer atten­tion and I believe there is a need to bet­ter under­stand why peo­ple drop out.

Accord­ing to the wired arti­cle, some of the rea­sons have to do with com­plex­i­ties related to going online. In order to resolve those issues, the indus­try needs to play closer atten­tion to user expe­ri­ence and start fig­ur­ing out how to make things eas­ier. Return on invest­ments in tech­nol­ogy will increase if more peo­ple use a sys­tem. More peo­ple will use a sys­tem if it’s eas­ier to use. How­ever, few com­pa­nies pay close atten­tion to those kinds of details. Next time some­one asks you why usabil­ity research is needed, point out the rela­tion­ship between usabil­ity and bot­tom dol­lars: the busi­ness peo­ple will imme­di­ately see the value.

A ques­tion remains, how­ever, on how to get peo­ple back. As stan­dard mar­ket­ing the­ory often points out, it is eas­ier to con­vert a cus­tomer that has never used a prod­uct than to get one that has unsuc­cess­fully used a prod­uct to come back. This is a chal­lenge that mar­keters every­where need to crack in order to increase over­all mar­ket shares.

Also of inter­est in the story is the fact that most dis­abled peo­ple do not go online. This seems to rep­re­sents a huge mar­ket for any­one as the Inter­net could actu­ally act as a great enabler for dis­abled peo­ple. Site devel­op­ers should pay close atten­tion to things like the World Wide Web Con­sor­tium WAI project which could help lure more dis­abled peo­ple online.

Last but not least is the ques­tion of eco­nom­ics and Inter­net access. Obvi­ously, there is a need for edu­ca­tion here as most libraries now offer Inter­net access for free. How­ever, recent efforts in mon­i­tor­ing what is done online in libraries prob­a­bly keeps some peo­ple from get­ting online and the remain­der is prob­a­bly either not aware that Inter­net access is avail­able at their local library, not inter­ested in going to the library (for edu­ca­tional rea­sons or other), or doesn’t see any value in the Inter­net. A way to solve this would be through bet­ter edu­ca­tional pro­grams related to the fact that the ser­vice is avail­able, address­ing quick wins by show­ing peo­ple how they can do cer­tain things faster online (for exam­ple, show­ing how peo­ple could get a bet­ter job or reduce the amount of time and money it takes to do some­thing by going online).

How­ever, all of these points have a pre-requisite. Before address­ing the prob­lem, we must first under­stand who those peo­ple are. A demo­graphic make-up of Inter­net drop-outs could help (are those peo­ple mostly from a cer­tain age group, for exam­ple) in under­stand­ing whether this might become a longer term trend that needs to be addressed or whether most of the prob­lem is going to go away over time (as kids nowa­days seem to get online at a faster rate than older people).