Partnership: usually with NGOs that deliver services to oral communities, involving team formation, capacity building and community engagement.
Diagnostics: includes analysis of documents deployed by the partner that oral users must understand, financial numeracy tests and focus groups that capture the existing user experience, and identification of gaps between user capabilities and partner documentation
OIM Design (Association): includes recruiting a local artist, defining a list of target concepts for oralization, conducting focus groups on associations between target concepts and familiar ideas and images, and collecting candidate image and other tools
OIM Design (Integration): ranking and weighting field resources against candidate integrated solutions, selecting an integrated solution, and wireframing
User Acceptance Testing: testing an integrated OIM solution for usability, learnability, memorability and guessability
Piloting and Roll-Out: production of selected OIM design, partner preparation for piloting, staff training, piloting, pilot evaluation, decision on roll-out, partner preparation for roll-out, staff training, roll-out of OIM design
Principles of OIM Design
Usability. OIM solutions are safely and conveniently usable by illiterate and innumerate individuals.
Curiosity. OIM solutions awaken curiosity and offer opportunities to ‘play around’ with place value notation, timestamps, and other ubiquitous features of financial interfaces.
Orality. OIM solutions are inspired and animated by the strengths and insights of oral cultures and practices, while opening doors to the strengths and insights of literate cultures and practices.
Control Systems. On a net basis, OIM solutions strengthen the control systems of formal financial institutions by enhancing customer awareness of record-keeping practices.
Literate Users. OIM solutions are designed in such as a way that they don’t inconvenience, embarrass or isolate literate customers. In fact, because of the deep orality within all of us, literate customers often prefer them to conventional solutions.
