INDIAN I.T.WIZKIDS

Indrani Medhi

ASSOCIATE RESEARCHER

         
           Contact me at indranim at microsoft dot com

 About me:

Indrani Medhi is an Associate Researcher in the Technology for Emerging Markets Group at Microsoft Research India in Bangalore. Her research interest is in the area of Ethnographic UI Design. Her current work has been in User Interfaces for Illiterate and Semi-Literate Users. She has a Masters degree in Design from Institute of Design, Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, USA (2005) and Bachelors degree in Architecture from Visvesvaraya National Institute of Technology, Nagpur, India (2002). Currently, she is also a 2^nd year Ph.D. student at the Industrial Design Centre, Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay (IIT Bombay), Mumbai, India.

Projects:

Text-Free User Interfaces: are design guidelines for computer-human interfaces that would allow any first-time, non-literate person, on first contact with a PC, to immediately realize useful interaction with minimal or no assistance. We arrived at the following design principles through an ethnographic design process involving over 300 hours and 250 people from urban slums in Bangalore, India: extensive use of hand-drawn, semi-abstracted cartoons with voice annotation, aggressive mouse-over functionality, a consistent help feature, and looping full-context video dramatizing the purpose and mechanism of the application. We have applied these principles to three applications – job-search for the informal labor market, health-information dissemination, and an electronic map. Rigorous user evaluations show that the text-free designs are strongly preferred over standard text-based interfaces and that first-time, non-literate users are, in fact, able to navigate through text-free UIs meaningfully.

Recently, we have also begun exploring design principles for mobile phones, and have conducted ethnographic design with 80 subjects across India, Philippines and South Africa. So far we have looked specifically at applications for mobile banking. This work is a part of the joint project on Mobile-phone-enabled banking and payments.

In this project we have observed a number of challenges encountered by subjects in interacting with the mobile banking services and navigating through mobile phones in general. Broad lessons from this ethnography resulted in developing design recommendations. This was followed by a usability study with another 58 subjects in India, in which we compared non-literate subjects on three systems that incorporated the design recommendations: text-based, spoken dialog, and rich multimedia. The tests confirmed that non-literate and semi-literate subjects were unable to make sense of the text-based UI and that while task-completion rates were better for the rich multimedia UI, speed was faster and less assistance was required on the spoken-dialog system.

In addition to this we are also trying to understand characteristics of the cognitive styles of those with little formal education and their implications for UI design for this population.

Hope PC: The goal is to understand (1) what a very low-income family would want out of a PC, (2) what usability issues they might encounter, and (3) what impact a PC might have on the family’s socio-economic status and behaviors. We have provided a PC with Windows XP to a low-income family residing in a Bangalore slum community for understanding usage.

  

Publications:

• Medhi, I., Cutrell, E., and Toyama, K. It's not just illiteracy. Proc. of India HCI/IDID conference, Mumbai, India (2010).
• Medhi, I., Nagasena, G. S. N., and Toyama, K. A Comparison of Mobile Money-Transfer UIs for Non-Literate and Semi-Literate Users. Proc. ACM Conference on Computer Human Interaction, Boston, USA, (2009)--[Best paper nomination CHI'09]
• Medhi, I., Ratan, A. and Toyama, K. Mobile-Banking Adoption and Usage by Low-Literate, Low-Income Users in the Developing World . Proc. Human Computer Interaction International, San Diego, USA, (2009).
• Medhi, I., Menon, G., and Toyama, K. Challenges of Computerized Job-Search in the Developing World. Proc. ACM Conference on Computer Human Interaction, Florence, Italy, (2008).
• Medhi, I. and Toyama, K. Full-Context Videos for First-Time, Non-Literate PC Users. IEEE/ACM International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development, Bangalore, India, (2007).
• Medhi, I., Prasad, A. and Toyama K. Optimal audio-visual representations for illiterate users. International World Wide Web Conference, Canada, (2007), 873-882.
• Medhi, I. and Kuriyan R. Text-Free UI: Prospects for Social Inclusion. International Conference on Social Implications of Computers in Developing countries. Brazil, May 2007
• Indrani Medhi. User-Centered Design for Development. ACM interactions. Vol. 14. Issue 4 (July+August 2007)
• Medhi, I., Sagar, A. and Toyama K. Text-Free User Interfaces for Illiterate and Semi-Literate Users. IEEE/ ACM International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development, Berkeley, USA, (2006). (Selected for the best paper edition of the ITID-Information Technologies and International Development journal)
• Medhi, I., Pitti B. and Toyama K. Text-Free UI for Employment Search. Asian Applied Computing Conference. Nepal, (2005).