INTRODUCTION

Mariam, an 18-year-old student from Nagpur, navigates the complexities of digital access in a household where cultural norms and limited resources constrain her use of a shared mobile phone. Currently in 11th grade, she enjoys playing games on mobile devices but only has access to a shared phone at home, where she lives with her three sisters and parents. Her family and neighbours form judgements on the moral character of young girls who use phones, believing that using a phone or being in touch with friends encourages ‘bad habits’ such as making boyfriends. Mariam can only use the phone at night for an hour or so, once her parents have gone to sleep and there is nobody to supervise her. In this context, she must navigate her digital life using the shared device.

She discovers ‘WhatsappGB’ , an unofficial variation of the popular messaging app. Using it reassures her, as it allows her to add a fingerprint lock to the app, limiting other family members from accessing her personal chats. Whether she is using popular social media applications to post dancing reels, or shopping on e-commerce platforms, every tap, search, and scroll is a balancing act between maintaining her safety, privacy, and managing societal expectations.

In this complex digital landscape, being able to establish trust with digital platforms becomes a precious commodity, as it is the missing link between the user and sustained digital use. However, digital trust is a highly technical concept, influenced largely by concerns of digital security, data privacy, and system accountability. The performance of technology is a chief way in which trust is framed for users across platforms, where risks to safety are dominantly represented by bad actors online. While this can mitigate and improve the ability of digital platforms to protect users from digital threats, there is a need to localise the fluid concept of trust within social security, communal privacy and existing practices of accountability.

For women, particularly in India, trust extends beyond the stable functionality of technology; it involves the navigation of social threats to their digital relationships. Women must grapple with the heavy monitoring of their access by parents and brothers, stemming from their vulnerability to unsolicited sexual requests from strangers and beliefs around women’s lack of competence around digital usage. This social environment around digital devices broadens the concerns of trust and safety in digital spaces – it creates a diminished agency and digital under-confidence for women, which must be treated as other threats are in the context of women’s safe and assertive usage. It is then crucial to re-establish confidence and control in the hands of women to build socially-conscious security and trust, with technology acting as a reliable and assuring ally against threats in all directions.

CUSTOMISING DIGITAL EXPERIENCES FOR TRUST

In this context, creating for trust requires more than just good tech design for safety. Platforms and digital services should create positive and empowering experiences that foster affinity and identification. For platforms to localise options, it is important to think of empathy and local contexts while designing solutions to genuinely address the needs of vulnerable communities. Women’s low self-efficacy, capability and appetite for risk can be superseded by a plethora of optionality, which can be mitigated by providing them “customised” experiences. Optionality in all features motivates tech to focus on expanding choice and multiplicity, ensuring that inclusion remains at the core of its usage, as well as wilful usage and trust-giving.

Through this piece, we look at customisation, a technological approach that allows users to tailor experiences to their preferences, giving them a sense of control. This can be done in multiple ways – by allowing the user to choose what font to type in, what wallpaper to use on her WhatsApp chats, or configuring privacy settings allowing for the disappearing feature in personal chats within a specified time frame. This is distinct from personalisation, a platform-level deployment where data is used to automatically adapt and enhance the experience by making it intuitive and personal to the user, e.g. YouTube recommending videos based on the user’s past viewing habits. We look beyond the aesthetic and identity-oriented customisability to see how designing for overall custom usability can be achieved.

Design is a space where women’s trust and reassurance can be unlocked for local resonance; it works successfully when it is a perfect “match between the system and the real world” , meaning that design should use familiar language and real-world conventions. For instance, the popularly programmed ‘heart’ icon on WhatsApp and Instagram is instantly connected with responding emotionally to an image or a message that resonates with the user. Another popular example would be of e-commerce apps like Amazon or Flipkart using the shopping cart icon to represent the online shopping cart. This enables the user to understand and navigate the system intuitively as these icons are familiar, there are no literacy barriers and they transcend language differences making the interface less intimidating. Designing technology to create “match”-based enjoyable usage ensures they feel a sense of power and ease of control.

One way of doing this is by providing localised content in vernacular languages and creating interfaces that align with local cultural norms, which make technology more relatable, and therefore accessible for women across various regions. For example, the financial app JAR used the vernacular term “Gulak” a term traditionally used for a clay or ceramic jar often used to save money, to resonate with women by using a familiar cultural reference.  Another way that control can be delivered is through applications and services that provide versions of their interfaces on low-bandwidth networks in areas with limited internet connectivity and scarcity of data packs – this ensures that women can access services and platforms despite poor network infrastructure. An example of this would be the ‘lite’ versions of various apps, such as NPCI’s UPI Lite, or Facebook Lite.

Designing straightforward and simple user interfaces which are easy to navigate makes technology intuitive and less intimidating, encouraging more women to engage with digital platforms. For instance, e-commerce platform Flipkart’s design strategy includes features like vernacular search formats and image-based search options, providing more rapid functionality and making the platform user-friendly for low-literate women who may not be familiar with traditional text-based searches.  Additionally, multiplicity of options like easy returns, credit lines, and cash-on-delivery bridges the gap between online and offline shopping as it replicates their physical world experience, where the user easily reaches out to a local shopkeeper to return a defective product. Incorporating simple interactive guides or small animations to explain functionalities, particularly those that reassure and walk women through the redressal processes, create more visual forms in which users absorb information and allows them to learn more independently.

Platforms can provide users with the ability to learn without shame. A possible way to do this is to design the interface to reflect a friendly learning tool with each step acting as a guide to the next one and in case of an error, allowing the user to try again. This leads to a feedback chain, allowing the user to learn independently, explore the platform and enhance trust in the platform and in oneself to continue using it. Another example is of JAR which incorporates one liner prompts such as ‘an investment a day, keeps fomo away’ encouraging users to invest every time they open the app, providing small friendly nudges to get users to invest in the platform, the minimum threshold to invest in is INR 1, making it easier for female users in tier 2 and 3 towns who may not have access to significant capital.

For low-literate users, the journey to making even a small change on an app should be straightforward and intuitive. Simple signifiers, such as clear toggle switches for settings, can help users understand when they have changed something from the default. For instance, a toggle switch that changes the colour of the screen or shows an icon when activated can signal to the user that a setting has been successfully changed. This visual feedback is crucial for users who may not be able to read detailed textual instructions. Immediate feedback that mimics real-world actions, such as sounds to confirm actions, can enhance the user’s sense of control and satisfaction, by providing instant, understandable feedback. Such as sounds indicating a successful payment transaction or the sound of the camera shutter while taking a picture on a phone, also make interfaces more dependable.

Addressing the real, fundamental issues in user experience design requires understanding the specific needs and contexts of the target population, including but not limited to the geographical region, language, education, income, and gender. Effective design must solve for numerous constraints, including usability, efficiency, and the joy of use. By studying the intended user groups in detail, platforms can create solutions that fit the needs of women and girls with specific needs and across contexts. These contexts include, but are not limited to, geographical regions, languages, education levels, income brackets, and diverse capabilities. A commitment to customisation not only meets functional requirements but also provides a more inclusive and satisfying user experience, which is critical to building long-term digital trust. For women, control is a strong lever through which they build confidence. Given the social environment of fear, doubt and low social protection it also prevents them from dropping off platform adoption and helps build a sustained digital relationship. Designing for control must be reconceived through local resonance, optionality and women-centricity for the unlocking of high trust behaviour in digital spaces.

^[1] India Today. “GB WhatsApp: What Is It, Should You Use It or Not?” India Today, 29 June 2021, https://www.indiatoday.in/technology/news/story/gb-whatsapp-what-is-it-should-you-use-it-or-not-1820744-2021-06-29

^[2] Jakob Nielsen’s second usability heuristic

^[3] Facebook Lite, UPI Lite