Interactions - March/April 2011

homes—from a massive mansion with sprawling gardens, to a four-room home in which seven people shared a single 3GB monthly connection—and to a variety of situations in between. We are struck by how almost everyone we spoke to was aware of the bandwidth constraint, adopting similar strategies to manage this limited resource, regardless of income level. In this way our research illustrates a way to blur the boundaries between the traditional dichotomies of studies of “household” use in developed markets versus those of “resource constrained” users in the developing world, the focal point of many ICT4D and HCI4D studies.

Moving forward, we suggest
the HCI community should con-
sider the implications of metered
bandwidth situations on matters
of inclusion, usability, and useful-
ness. Specifically, we need to bet-
ter understand how a cap affects
Internet use, what tools and infor-
mation people need to help them
deal with metered usage, and how
existing websites and tools can be
more accommodating of people
who are on usage-based band-
width plans. Whether via landlines
or, increasingly, mobile phones,
metered bandwidth may challenge
the freewheeling metaphors that
we have allowed to become syn-
onymous with Internet use, such as
“browsing” and “surfing.” By exam-
ining Internet use under this form
of constraint, we will broaden the
HCI4D discourse by opening up con-
versations and avenues for research
along a continuum of users, beyond
the easy dichotomies of developed
and developing. In doing so, we
may improve the ways in which we
design and build experiences for the
next billion Internet users.

End notEs

[ 1] Chetty, M., Banks, R., Harper, R., Regan, T., Sellen, A., Gkantsidis, C., Karagiannis, T. and Key, P. Who’s Hogging the Bandwidth?: The consequences of revealing the invisible in the home. Proc. of the 28th International Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. (Atlanta, GA, April 10-15). ACM, New York, 2010. [ 2] Max Planck Institute for Software Systems. Glasnost: Bringing Transparency to the Internet; http://broadband.mpi-sws.org/transparency/ [ 3] Measurement Lab; http://www.measurement lab.net/ [ 4] Wyche, S.P., Smyth, T.N., Chetty, M., Aoki, P.M. and Grinter, R.E. Deliberate interactions: Characterizing technology use in Nairobi, Kenya. Proc. of the 28th International Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. (Atlanta, GA, April 10-15). ACM, New York, 2010. [ 5] CIA World Fact Book; https://www.cia.gov/ library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/ sf.html/ [ 6] The Broadband Bible; http://www.the-broadbandbible.co.za/wordpress/wp-content/ uploads/2009/12/TheBroadbandBible.pdf/

About thE Authors Marshini Chetty is a Ph.D. candidate in the Human-Centered Computing program at Georgia Tech. Her research focus is on home computing in resource-rich and resource-constrained settings.

Richard Banks is a senior interaction designer at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, UK. He spent a decade working on the interface design of a broad set of Microsoft’s products before joining the research division in 2006.

A.J. Bernheim Brush is a researcher at Microsoft Research in Redmond, WA. Her research area is HCI with a focus on ubiquitous computing in the home and continuous sensing on mobile devices.

Jonathan Donner is a researcher in the Technology for Emerging Markets Group at Microsoft Research India. His research is focused on the spread of mobile telephony in the developing world.

Rebecca E. Grinter is an associate professor in the School of Interactive Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Her research interests include human-computer interaction and computer supported collaborative work.