This piece in BusinessWeek does a great job at bringing to light the huge discrepancy between how the concept of “mobile” is so vastly different here in the US than it is in developing markets like India. This has come up a lot recently at work and I think it provides really valuable perspective when thinking about designing mobile applications.
For us in the US, our mobile devices often serve as satellites to our PC experience and we often evaluate our mobile experiences in terms of how they compare to that PC experience. In India, there are 30 million PCs and 300 million phones and for many people the mobile phone is the only way people are going to experience being online. Ever. This means that you can’t rely on the PC experience to provide any additional context to a corresponding mobile experience, which makes for an even more challenging mobile design process.
Interesting - this, again, tells us to broaden our horizont, not only designing mobile apps but in all respects.
It sounds so obvious and simple, but I’ve never thought this way.