If you’re a big Internet company and wanted to develop useful mobile services for African countries, how do you find out what the people in Africa would search for on the Internet if they have never used it before? Well, in Google’s case, you just go right ahead and ask.

From Google’s Blog: “In early 2008 we set out with colleagues from Google.org, Grameen Applab and MTN (a network carrier in Uganda) with this challenge in mind. Our research needed to be able to assess the feasibility of delivering information via mobile in Uganda as well as evaluate the content “appetites” of local people. Since no search engine existed for testing, we did the next best thing: We decided to mimic the experience of using a search engine using human experts.”

What they set out to do is to go to a number of locations and engage with a diverse section of the population asking individuals if the would be keen to participate in the study.

If the person agreed, he was simply handed a mobile phone and asked to send a text message of any question he’d like answered.

“The text message was then routed to a control room we’d set up in Kampala where a human expert read the text message, typed a response, and sent it back via SMS to the person who asked the question.”

This SMS service was launched in Uganda last week…”Our research enabled us to observe first-hand how people instinctively wanted to interact with a mobile phone. We let people select the language they wanted to use. We gained deep insights into the way people formulate their questions and what questions really matter to them. On top of that, we saw the excitement on people’s faces when they got their first-ever search results, and we realized that some of the information we could deliver to these users, such as health information, has the power to truly change lives.”

For the entire article, follow this link: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/07/designing-useful-mobile-services-for.html