Rewriting the Human-Computer interaction Handbook

On March 8, as the world celebrates International Women’s Day, all eyes were on 31-year old Indrani Medhi when she stepped up to the podium at Emtech 2010 to receive her honour as a technological trendsetter.

Medhi, an Associate Researcher at Microsoft Research India, is the only woman in the sought after India TR35 roll of honours, a list of 20 promising young innovators under 35 handpicked by an eminent jury selected by Technology Review India. The 111-year old technology magazine from MIT unveiled its list at the emerging technologies conference EmTech in Bangalore.

Medhi gets the accolades from the India TR35 jury for her work in helping those who cannot read use mobile phones and PCs easily. A student of design, Medhi has developed text-free user interfaces (UIs) to allow any illiterate or semi-literate person on first contact with a computer, to immediately know how to proceed with minimal or no assistance.

As Medhi points out, in text-based conventional information architecture found in mobile phones and PCs, there is a number of usability challenges that semi-literate people face. By using a combination of voice, video and graphics in an innovative way, Medhi has overcome this challenge. Medhi discovered the kind of barriers that illiterate populations face in using technology through an ethnographic design process involving more than 400 women from low-income, low-literate communities across India, the Philippines, and South Africa. “In addition to the general inability to read text, the other major challenge was the difficulty in navigating hierarchical menus in current information architectures,” says Medhi.

To overcome these barriers, Medhi applied a few key principles: extensive use of hand-drawn, semi-abstracted cartoons with voice annotation in the local language, aggressive mouse-over functionality, a consistent help feature, and looping full-context video dramatizing the purpose and mechanism of the application.

Demonstrating sensitivity in understanding the needs of the illiterate population who will be using this interface, Medhi has applied these principles to design four applications: job-search for the informal labor market, health-information dissemination, a mobile money-transfer system, and an electronic map. A lot of thinking has gone into her design, where she has studied cultural context, motivation and cognitive difficulties before building her framework.