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I am an Associate Researcher in the Technology for Emerging Markets Group at
Microsoft Research India in Bangalore. My research interest is in the area of Ethnographic UI Design. My current work has been
in User Interfaces for Illiterate and Semi-Literate Users. I have a Masters degree in
Design from Institute of Design, Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago,
USA (2005) and Bachelors degree in Architecture from Visvesvaraya National
Institute of Technology, Nagpur, India (2002). |
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Indrani Medhi |
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Projects |
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Text-Free UI project |
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People involved: Indrani Medhi, Kentaro Toyama Text-Free User
Interfaces are design guidelines for computer-human interfaces that would
allow any first-time, non-literate person, on first contact with a PC, to
immediately realize useful interaction with minimal or no assistance. We
arrived at the following design principles through an ethnographic design
process involving over 300 hours and 250 people from urban slums in
Bangalore, India: extensive use of hand-drawn, semi-abstracted cartoons with
voice annotation, aggressive mouse-over functionality, a consistent help
feature, and looping full-context video dramatizing the purpose and mechanism
of the application. We have applied these principles to three applications –
job-search for the informal labor market, health-information dissemination,
and an electronic map. Rigorous user evaluations show that the text-free
designs are strongly preferred over standard text-based interfaces and that
first-time, non-literate users are, in fact, able to navigate through
text-free UIs meaningfully. Recently, we have also begun exploring design
principles for mobile phones, as well as to understand characteristics of the
cognitive styles of those with little formal education. |
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Hope PC project |
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People involved: Indrani Medhi, Kentaro Toyama The goal of
the Hope PC project is to understand (1) what a very 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 are providing a PC with Windows Starter Edition to a low-income
family residing in a Bangalore slum community for a period of one year.
Through interviews and observations, we seek to understand how the family
responds to the PC. |
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Health Worker project |
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People involved: Indrani Medhi, Kentaro Toyama, Archana
Prasad The goal of this project is to understand the role of computing technology to aid health workers in effective health information gathering and transmitting process. We are currently working with preventive and social medicine centers and health workers, doing ethnography on field; studying existing information and communication materials; checking the possibility of designing innovative tools for collecting health information. |
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Publications
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1.
Medhi,
I., Menon, G., and Toyama, K. Challenges in Computerized Job Search for the
Developing World. Proc. of ACM Conference on Computer Human Interaction (CHI),
Florence, Italy, April 2008 (to appear) 2. Prasad, A.,
Medhi, I., Toyama, K., and Balakrishnan, R. Exploring the Feasibility of
Video Mail for Illiterate Users. Proc. of International Working Conference on
Advanced Visual Interfaces (AVI), Napoli, Italy, May 2008 (to appear) (Selected as the highest ranked
paper) 9. Medhi, I., Sagar A., and Toyama K. Text-Free User
Interfaces for Illiterate and Semi-Literate Users. International Conference
on Information and Communication Technologies and Development. Berkeley, USA, May
2006 (Selected for the best paper edition
of the ITID-Information Technologies and International Development journal) 10. Medhi, I., Pitti B. and
Toyama K. Text-Free UI for Employment Search. Asian Applied Computing
Conference. Nepal, December 2005 |
The
Technology for Emerging Markets Group
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