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For over a billion
people on the planet, the power of computing is largely out of reach due to
illiteracy. How can we expand the impact of technology to those who cannot read?
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. To view demo click here>> People
involved: Indrani Medhi, Kentaro Toyama |
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Text-Free UI for Job Search |
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We have applied the Text-Free UI design principles to an online job-search site for the informal labor market- http://www.babajob.com - which also leverages online social networking. Today in India, workers in the informal labor sector find employment entirely through word of mouth, with almost no formal or organized means of identifying potential employers. The goal of the project is to successfully establish a computer-based system to help match non-literate, low-income workers with potential middle-class employers, in Bangalore, India. This application allows prospective employers to post precise job descriptions through text-based forms and the non-literate, low-income job seekers to search for best-paying jobs through dynamic webpages displayed in Text-Free UI form. To view the Text-Free UI for Job Search prototype please visit: http://www.babajob.com/tfoverview.htm |
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Text-Free UI for Health Information |
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In this pilot test we are developing a Text-Free UI application that
specifically disseminates health-related educational information to
illiterate patients, their friends and family at hospital wards and village
health camps. The aim of this pilot is to understand whether a Text-Free
computing application disseminating health information, can be used by
first-time, illiterate users with very little or no human assistance in order
to extract relevant information. This is being done at Sankara Eye Center (www.sankaraeye.com), a specialty eye care institution in Coimbatore dedicated to eradicating preventable and curable
blindness in India through one of the largest rural outreach programs. This application seeks to educate patients and their family and friends about basic preventive and curative health care through an interactive application. These applications will be installed on PCs set-up in common lobby spaces in the base hospital and village camps. |
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Full-Context Videos for First-Time, Non-Literate
PC Users Research |
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Following previous work
focused on non-literate users, we observed that in spite of our subjects’
understanding of the UI mechanics, they experienced barriers beyond
illiteracy in interacting with the computer: lack of awareness of what the PC
could deliver, fear and mistrust of the technology, and lack of comprehension
about how information relevant to them was embedded in the PC. We address these
challenges with full-context video, which includes dramatizations of how a
user might use the application and how relevant information comes to be
contained in the computer, in addition to a tutorial of the UI. In
experiments conducted with 35 non-literate residents of Bangalore slums, the
introduction of full-context video dramatically improved task completion for
a job-search task. |
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Optimal Audio-Visual Representations for
Illiterate Users Research |
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This project is a part of the Text-Free UI
research. The goal of this project is to understand the optimal audio-visual
representation style for illustrating concepts to illiterate and
semi-literate users of computers. In our user study, we
presented to 200 illiterate subjects each of 13 different health symptoms in
one representation randomly selected among the following ten: text, static
drawings, static photographs, hand-drawn animations, and video, each with and
without voice annotation. The goal was to see how comprehensible these
representation types were for an illiterate audience. We used a methodology for generating each of the representations tested
in a way that fairly stacks one representational type against the others.
Our main results are that (1) voice annotation
generally helps in speed of comprehension, but bimodal audio-visual
information can be confusing for the target population; (2) richer
information is not necessarily better understood overall; (3) the relative
value of dynamic imagery versus static imagery depends on various factors. |
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 page>>