Associate Researcher  

 Brief bio:

Indrani Medhi is an Associate Researcher in the Technology for Emerging Markets Group at Microsoft Research India in Bangalore. Her research interest is in the area of User Experience Design, and Technology for Global Development. Her primary work has been in User Interfaces for Low-Literate and Novice Technology Users. Indrani has a Masters degree in Design from Institute of Design, Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT-ID), Chicago, USA. Currently, she is also a 4^th year Ph.D. candidate at the Industrial Design Centre, Indian Institute of Technology, (IIT Bombay), India.

In 2010, Indrani was listed in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology-Technology Review’s MIT TR35 2010 world’s top 35 innovators under the age of 35; featured in the list of "50 Smartest People in Technology" in 2010 by Fortune magazine; and won the "Young Indian Leader" award for 2010 from CNN IBN.

Projects

1) Text-Free User Interfaces:

One of the greatest challenges in developing Information and Communication Technologies for global development is that 41% of the population in the least developed countries is non-literate (UNESCO 2007) and even the literate among the poor are only novice users of technology. “Text-Free UIs” are design principles and recommendations for computer-human interfaces that would allow a first-time, non-literate person, on first contact with a PC or a mobile phone, to immediately realize useful interaction with minimal or no external assistance. Through an ethnographic design and iterative prototyping process and rigorous user evaluations, involving more than 700 hours spent in the field and 570 study participants from low-income, low-literate communities across India, the Philippines and South Africa, we established design principles that use combinations of voice, video and graphics (ToCHI’11, CHI’09). We have applied these principles to designing three PC and mobile phone-based applications:

- Job-search for the informal labor market (CHI’08, ITID’07)

- Health-information dissemination (WWW’07)

- Mobile-phone-enabled banking and payments (CHI’09, HCII’09).

Rigorous user evaluations with test participants confirmed that our non-textual designs were strongly preferred over standard text-based interfaces and that first-time, non-literate users were, in fact, able to navigate through our UIs meaningfully (ToCHI’11, ITID’07).

Currently we are conducting research in understanding characteristics of the cognitive styles of those with little formal schooling and how that has implications for UI design for this population.

2) Digital Slate:

In rural settings within developing countries where digital devices are not pervasive, all written records are maintained on paper forms which take a long time to aggregate and process data, resulting in corresponding delays in remedial action. We study this problem in the context of malnutrition treatment of rural children in Madhya Pradesh through ethnographic interviews and contextual inquiries, and present a health data record management application on a low-cost digital slate prototype built through iterative prototyping. The solution directly accepts handwritten input on ordinary paper notebooks placed on the digitizing pad of the slate, and provides immediate electronic feedback on the display of this device. This simultaneously generates a paper and digital record of the data. The digital slate’s micro SD card can be transferred to a mobile phone and the data sent to the backend database via GPRS. The server is updated at the end of each day, and the summary of the data is made available to the decision makers.

3) Hope PC:

The goal of this project is to understand (1) what a low-income family would want out of a PC, (2) what usability issues they might encounter, and (3) what impact a PC might have on the family’s socio-economic status and behaviors. We provided a PC to a low-income family residing in a Bangalore slum community and are conducting ethnographic interviews for understanding usage.