Making and Breaking the User-Usage Model: WhatsApp Adoption Amongst Emergent Users in India.

In this paper, we aim to relate the design of WhatsApp with its adoption in developing countries and inform the design of future products. In the last two and a half years, a large number of 'emergent users' in India, have adopted WhatsApp. They have been able to do 'account holding' tasks with a greater ease, which means they establish social online identities, manage off-line communication, share and forward content, and create and join groups with less difficulty. WhatsApp has certain design based advantages over the conventional account holding applications whose adoption is not easy by the emergent users because ofcertain barriers. These barriers arise due to user characteristics like lack of technology exposure andlow levels of education and income. We used User-Usage model as a theoretical lens to understand how design features of WhatsApp may have helped the emergent users overcome the common barriers. This analysis was supported with the findings of contextual interviews done with 108 emergent users to understand their WhatsApp usage. We found that simplification of registration process and interaction mechanisms, reduction of choices, freeing users from cognitively intensive chores and sacrificing features that were less relevant in users' contexts were some of the ways through which the design of WhatsApp managed to remove barriers in adoption. This study helps us identify the design choices that could make other applications easier to adopt by the emergent users.