[Guest Post] Success in Indonesia: “Mobile” and “Social”

This guest post is written by Qonita Shahab, a researcher in UX who used to work in IT. Her interest in music and photography helps her in designing interactive system prototypes. Since she started research in the field of persuasive technology, Qonita studied more about social psychology and the communal use of technology.

The importance of understanding the geography of Indonesia in relation to the development of internet infrastructure caught my attention in 2003 when I met Korean IT infrastructure developers. At that time, the majority of (South) Korea was already interconnected through broadband, while in Indonesia home internet access (dial-up) was still expensive yet unreliable, resulting in many users accessing internet from their workplaces or internet cafes.

They said, “The only way to make Indonesia interconnected is by using wireless connections, because it’s too expensive to build wired connections across this country with thousands of islands spread across large area.” Even though it was a dark age for wireless technology because of the difficulty imposed by government regulation, I always remembered those words.

We didn’t have to wait a decade; today the telecommunication technology enables wireless devices such as cell-phones to perform data communication with a decent speed. When Facebook started their Lite version in late 2009, it was the time of massive growth of Facebook users from Indonesia (the highest in Asia by February 2010). Followed by mobile internet GSM/CDMA services available in USB sticks, wireless connection in Indonesia started to reach laptop and PC users at home.

Nevertheless, to Indonesians it is more affordable economically to have cell-phones than to have computers. With a standard cell-phone and a text messaging service, more people access mobile version applications than their corresponding desktop versions. With the increasing buying power of middle class citizens and the development of processor, memory, and touchscreen technology (smartphones), there is an increasing number of users accessing internet from cell-phones compared to the situation a few years ago. At this point I see that there is still a lot of room for development of cell-phone applications in Indonesia, so it’s considered as a success factor for internet based application in Indonesia.

There is another factor that supports the success of internet based application in Indonesia, which is the culture of the Indonesian people. According to Geert Hofstede, Indonesia is one of the few countries that have low individualism, even lower than other Asian countries. In other words, Indonesian society is a communal culture. Indonesian people have social life based on long term relationship, loyalty and kinship.

If according to Robin Dunbar, human brain can only maintain connections with 150 people at most, then the communal Indonesian society has a definition for friend and family that is unlimited by the capacity of the brain. Because Indonesians interact not just between individuals but often as a group, their brain enables interactions with more than 150 people (extreme: 150 groups). We can see it from the massive use of social media applications, e.g. Facebook and Twitter.

None of those were made by Indonesians, but they have the most users (Twitter) and second most users (Facebook) from Indonesia. Both applications make us possible to interact with up to thousands of people if we want it. With the communal culture of Indonesians, the user growth for these applications are quite fast because of the tendency of following what is done by other people in the same group.

The functions in these applications also support this ‘word of mouth’ interactions even more, because it’s so easy to spread information in a simple way (with a little typing and clicks). Here, I see the function of social network to be a success factor for internet based applications made for Indonesian people.

[image source: gettyimages/95752805]