Kolkata: A 31-year-old woman associate researcher of Microsoft Research India has developed a text-free user interface to expand the impact of technology and help those who cannot read.
The text-free user interface allows an illiterate person to interact with minimal or no assistance on first contact with a computer.
"Through a design process involving over 400 subjects from low-income, low-literacy communities across India, the Philippines, and South Africa, I discovered that there were a number of challenges which people experienced while interacting with traditional text-based UIs, on both mobile phones and PCs," said Indrani Medhi.
"In addition to the general inability to read text, the other major challenge was the difficulty in navigating. I developed design recommendations for non-textual UIs for low-literate users that use combinations of voice, video, and graphics," she said.
Medhi’s applications are based on a few key principles: extensive use of hand-drawn, semi-abstracted cartoons with voice annotation in the local language, aggressive mouse-over functionality, a help feature and looping full-context video dramatising the purpose and mechanism of the application.
Mehdi has applied these principles to design four applications: job-search for the informal labour market, health-information dissemination, a mobile money-transfer system and an electronic map.
"Medhi has painstakingly and methodically conducted research to understand how to design user interfaces for computing devices such that illiterate and semi-literate users can use them," says Kentaro Toyama, former assistant managing director of Microsoft Research India.
"She has spent a lot of time in slum communities understanding the needs and aspirations of the people of those communities and their daily lives," Toyama said.
She said Mehdi developed a robust framework which included using images and voice feedback.
"She also realised the importance of semi-abstract cartoons rather than photographs or simplified icons, or the allowance for numeric digits in some cultures where people can read numbers even though they can’t read words," Toyama said.
Indrani also discovered that illiterate subjects, because of their previous inexperience with computing, had other barriers to technology use, including intimidation by technology, fear of breaking technology, and lack of mental models on how the technology worked.
Mehdi devised the use of 'full-context videos' with content that featured not only instructional material, but a mini-story about how the technology worked in a real-life scenario, Toyama said.
During her research work, Medhi also discovered a host of nuanced issues beyond strict usability which mediate how a low-literate user interacts with computing technologies.
"Such issues include cognitive difficulties, collaboration, cultural etiquette, experience and exposure, intimidation, mediation, motivation, pricing, power relations, social standing, and others.
"These factors can have far-reaching influence on the design of UIs as well as services for low-literate populations," she said.
Medhi is now conducting research in understanding characteristics of the cognitive styles of those with little formal education and how that has implications for UI design.
PTI
First Published: Sunday, March 14, 2010, 11:11