Adult Literacy Initiative Through Mobile Applications

This is an age of “segmentation”, and as the marketing gurus call it – the “one-size-fits-all” strategy does not work. A company has written the script for its own failure if it does that. But segmentation based marketing strategy is never easy and as put very bluntly by Steve Jobs – “You can’t just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time, you get it built, they’ll want something new”.

It can’t be more true especially in the digital market space. People have different level of digital literacy based on myriad number of socio-economic factors, age, profession, gender, and so on. The segmentation that is required is often too expensive a choice for firms, and is a difficult trade-off decision at the top.

For mobile apps, targeting adults and segregating them from the younger generation is not a choice; it’s more of a compulsion. Mobile apps are emerging as new learning tools not just for children and teenagers but for adults as well. However, app developers have not realised the true potential of adult literacy apps and there are not enough apps that cater the targeted audience in this category.

For an app to become successful, it is a very important that its design must focus on its target audience. Apps made for younger students cannot cater to the needs of adult students. Younger students have been growing up with this technology and so they have different expectations from learners of advanced age. Adult learners require ease and convenience of use, which is a lot more demanding need to fulfil as compared to the requirements of the young learners. Targeting this group means meeting the high expectations that they have from their mobile devices.

To appeal to adults, any educational app has to have an intuitive design and easy interface. Often a short tutorial on navigate within the app could prove to be very helpful. Adults can learn quickly but can also get frustrated easily and quickly.

These are basically issues of designs. There are various other issues as well that may trouble the adult learners. For instance, the need to update apps could be a nightmare given the speed at which apps are updated these days. Then, the sheer number of apps residing on the mobile phones today is at times scary even for the well initiated.

Imagine the plight of someone who isn’t too comfortable, and then having to organise his or her apps on the mobile devices. The auto update and the app bundling feature of Anant Computing Platform could prove to be a winner for your firm.

The ease with which Anant provides vernacular support in different Indian languages also means that this platform is capable of addressing the adult learners coming from different geographical and linguistic regions. The more segmentation you go for, the more your development cost is going to be. But this feature combined with the portability of apps across different OS will certainly compensate for the additional cost of development for different linguistic segments and different mobile devices working on diverse OS. Add to it the minuscule memory space required for apps bundled into Anant AppWallet and you could just be on the way to a real deal clincher.