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Indrani Medhi

‘Slumdog’ Jamal wants to send money to his lady love Latika

He has a million rupees, but NO bank account

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Mobile Banking

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Who is the Technology Review Audience?

Illiterate– does not know to use non-voice functions on the phone

UI– Text heavy, complex navigation

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Who is the Technology Review Audience?

Text-Free UIs are design guidelines for Computer Human Interfaces that would

allow any non-literate person on first contact with a PC or mobile phone to

immediately realize useful interaction with minimal or no assistance.

Technology and Innovation:

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Who is the Technology Review Audience?Ethnographic Design Process

India

Philippines

South Africa

450 subjects, 400+ hours in the field

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Who is the Technology Review Audience?

No text, but numbers are okay

Extensive use of hand-drawn, semi-abstracted cartoons

Voice annotation in the local language

Aggressive mouse-over functionality

A consistent help feature

Looping full-context video dramatizing the purpose and mechanism of the application

Design Principles

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Who is the Technology Review Audience?Text-Free Phone UIs

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Who is the Technology Review Audience?Text-Free PC UI

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Who is the Technology Review Audience?Usability test results

•Text-Free UI designs strongly preferred over standard text-based UIs

•First-time, non-literate users, in fact, able to navigate through Text-Free UIs meaningfully

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Current work

Thank You

Indrani Medhi

Microsoft Research India

indranim@microsoft.com

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/indranim/default.aspx

•Pilot projects

•Design of UIs vis-à-vis cognitive capacities of low-literate users