Using HCI to leverage communication technology

Uue of Mobile Technologies in the Developing Worl

Toward Empowered Design

Pragmatic design requires no radical alterations to the existing technology ecology and has successfully provided many viable solutions. Given the skills limitations within the developing world, however, developers also need a new design focus that views the user as designer

Ubiquitous Computing and Cellular Handsets—are menus the best way forward?

Embedded interactive computer systems, such as those found in cellular handsets, can be hard to use. The combination of small form factor – limited input and output potential – and an increasing feature set, result in devices which confuse novice users. Although most of these devices utilise hierarchical menu structures to mediate the interaction between user and device, we believe that these menus are poorly designed and that other interaction styles may be more appropriate. In this paper we will investigate how well menu design research has been used by current handset manufacturers. We will also propose and report on the success of some new interface designs and finally examine how new Internet technologies, like WML, might be used to further improve the handset’s interface

Making the Link – providing mobile media for novice communities in the developing world

In this paper we investigate the media needs of low-income mobile users in a South African township. We develop and deploy a system that allows users to download media at no costs to themselves, in order to probe future media requirements for similar user groups. We discover that, not only are the community interested in developmental information, but are just as interested in sharing local music or videos. Furthermore, the community consume the media in ways that we did not expect which had direct impacts on their lives. Finally, we conclude with some reflections on the value of media and the most appropriate ways to deliver it in developing world communities

Interactive Personal Storytelling An Ethnographic Study and Simulation of Apartheid-Era Narratives

This paper reports on a digital storytelling project which seeks to create interactive storytelling of personal experience narratives. We begin with an ethnographic study of two resident storytellers at the District Six Museum, Cape Town, Noor Ebrahim and Joe Schaffers, who tell audience their personal Apartheid-era narratives. An analysis of their narratives and audience interactions led to the design a digital storytelling prototype in the form of a virtual environment containing two storyteller agents based on Joe and Noor. These agents simulated two interactions: questions in which users could ask the storyteller agents questions; and exchange structures where storyteller agents ask users questions. We evaluated the effectiveness of these in a controlled experiment (n = 101) and found that questions led to significant increases in narrative engagement (p=0.05) and interest (p=0.02) while exchange structures significantly improved narrative enjoyment (p=0.004), engagement (p=0.002) and interest (p=0.02)

Providing Media Download Services in African Taxis

In this paper we design and evaluate a system that allows users to download media over Bluetooth in a public transport situation in the developing world. Our work examines how the benefits of previous successful desktop systems can be ported to an entirely mobile platform which allows it to be deployed in a moving vehicle. We explore and test the performance of the system both in a static location (where the mobile system performs as well as the desktop system) and in a mobile setting (where results are more mixed). Finally, we make recommendations and give insights into barriers for placing media distribution systems in public transport

Bringing Digital Storytelling to the Mobile

Technology has changed the way in which people tell their stories. This paper introduces digital storytelling and looks at why the mobile is an ideal platform for creating digital stories. The iterative design approach chosen for our Mobile Digital Storytelling system is discussed. Results of a final experiment, comparing our system to an existing mobile system that supports digital storytelling, are presented, which suggest that our system has met its design goals of providing an effective and efficient user interface. Qualitative insights from user evaluations show that mobile digital storytelling has a future

Supporting Mobile Applications Developer through Java IDE Using Contextual Inquiry

Contextual Inquiry (CI) is a method developed by Beyer and Holtzblatt for grounding design in the context of work being performed by user(s). This paper is about identify ways of improving the usability of Java Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) for developing mobile applications. We also describe our approach of this method to support mobile application developers, through the use of an IDE (NetBeans IDE in the context of this research). CI provides useful data on the typical problems found in various tools for developing mobile applications on which our design ideas were based. The data that was collected from this method was subjected to further analysis and quantification, beyond what Beyer and Holtzblatt suggested as well as a way to defend the potential usefulness of mobile IDE for mobile applications development

Working with NGOs through Fair Partnerships

This paper highlights how Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) can be utilized during the design of Information Communication Technologies for Development (ICT4D). We use the design process of a voter education system as a case study, which incorporated three NGOs from two African countries. Of key interest to us are the ways in which we can avoid exploiting these NGOs and make sure the ICT intervention meets their goals, as well as those of the researcher

Holistic Programming Environments

As a result of the popularity of graphical user interfaces, it is now almost impossible to buy a programming language compiler – instead, one purchases a development environment. Of course, we can scoff at the distinction and say that a development environment is nothing more than a programming language with visual (as opposed to syntactic) sugar. We believe, however, that this view must change if safer and more responsible programming languages are to be created for the next generation of programmer. This paper reports our motivation for wishing to integrate language and environment and makes suggestions as to how this may be achieved