Menu-based service access and delivery pattern: Towards achieving equatable access to digital services

Abstract

The proliferation of mobile phones in developing countries such as South Africa has been revolutionary. This might have sufficed to address the issues of digital divide but not the digital difference. The latter means that not all these mobile phones have equal technological capabilities and this in turn has impact on the nature of the functionality that the mobile phone affords to its user. The basic capability of a mobile phone is the ability to process and display textual information. This capability is used in basic service such as Short Message Service (SMS) as well as Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD). There is a need for a service access and delivery pattern that can facilitate the delivery of services using common-lowest denominator in terms of technological capabilities of mobile phones. This paper describes the conceptualization and reference implementation of a menu-based service access and delivery pattern. The reference implementation has demonstrated that through the menu-based pattern, the same content traditionally accessible only to Smartphones can be made available to low-end mobile phones as well.