KIRAN MATHUR MOHAMMED and EDWARD INGLEFIELD
There exists in our market an often-perverse tolerance for self-suffering perpetuated by a seemingly bottomless capacity for forgiveness of legacy processes.
Take the dozens of customers in bank or grocery queues, who wilfully join the lines week after week. We rank last on the World Values Survey Trust Index, meaning our willingness to engage with and try new things is just as low.
Yet we have a mobile penetration rate of close to 140 per cent and an internet penetration of nearly 80 per cent.
Why aren't we getting it right? Online banking was introduced to Trinidad and Tobago in the mid-2000s, but it would seem that despite huge spending there really hasn't been much effort put into improving the experience. It took more than 15 years for the sign-up process to become paperless. For many who are already sceptical about technology, all they need is one excuse to not adopt, and you can usually find one quite quickly.
Even in the developed world, stickiness is staggeringly low: eight out of ten first-time app users will never use it again. It's no wonder that so many new apps die so quickly. But why is that? Why do obviously good ideas, with obvious customer value, not survive in the market?
There are so many micro-decisions that result in someone completing - or not completing - a task. When these become overwhelming, we make irrational decisions that ultimately cost us. The trick to creating solutions is figuring out where these decisions are made and how we reduce the risk of an exit.
We found this out extremely quickly - and sometimes painfully - while developing our startup medl. We are a banker and baker; neither of us had any business being in the medical field.
But recognising very early that we 'did not have the knowledge' was a bit terrifying but ultimately, led us to forming a guiding principle that frames most of, if not all of the decisions that we make in the business, 'If you don't know, ask.' We assumed nothing and took nothing for granted.
We were both working full-time positions and holding design and scoping workshops out of a borrowed office. The dream felt a long way off, but we knew that this was the most critical element of being able to execute medl properly. The expertise of a former Google engineer and a local design guru, combined with data from interviewing 50-odd clinicians and 'family and friends' focus groups, allowed us to develop the framework of our doctor platform and patient app. In many ways, being both non-technical and non-medical worked in our favour. We were so disconnected from both fields that we were ultimately able to focus on the one thing that we could recognise: how the platform feels.
The best platforms constantly iterate. Not ad nauseum, but with calculated efficiency that allows for user feedback to be fed directly into the platform. Your best critics are always going to be the end users, and they will always, without fail, find a way to break your platform. The quicker we are able to recognise
