ideas, particularly if there is potential for future improvement. People we have worked with in rural communities are willing to use early versions (even if they are less than satisfactory prototypes) to better inform later ones. Furthermore, not only are people eager to help, but they usually also have lots of time with which to do so—time isn’t money quite as much as we’re used to. Also, in contrast to the so-called developed world, people in the communities we’ve worked with are extremely respectful, and genuinely interested in what we have to say, making it a really enjoyable place to conduct research.

 

March + April 2013

interactions

Designing for Development— Our View

Here are some of the ways in which we have adapted our research methods to living and working in India.

Technology. In contrast to work-
ing in the U.K., where the most
up-to-date and state-of-the-art
devices are quickly adopted by
users, the communities we have
worked with differ significantly.
People have neither the money nor
the experience to use high-end
mobile devices. Cheap, low-end,
dumb, or feature phones (e.g., J2ME/
Symbian) are commonplace [ 8].
Even if people do not own a hand-
set personally, devices are often
shared between friends and family
members [ 9]. As a result, we have
targeted our work to be usable on
the low-end devices that people
are already using. For example, we
have worked closely with the team
behind the Spoken Web [ 10], which
is a telephone-based information
service already in use in several
rural Indian communities. We’ve
designed several new interac-
tion methods for this IVR system,
but have ensured that they can
always be used on existing devices,
with no loss of functionality.