BANGALORE, INDIA: Technology has for long been a male dominated space. But on March 8, as the world celebrates International Women’s Day, all eyes are on 31-year old Indrani Medhi when she steps 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 are 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.

The robust framework she has developed includes obvious recommendations such as using images and voice feedback, but also very subtle insights such as the importance of semi-abstract cartoons rather than photographs or simplified icons, or the allowance for numeric digits in some cultures where people can read numbers even though they can’t read words.

“Medhi has painstakingly and methodically conducted research to understand how to design user interfaces for computing devices such that illiterate and semi-literate users can use them. She has spent a lot of time in the slum communities understanding the needs and aspirations of the people of those communities and their daily lives,” says Kentaro Toyama, former assistant managing director of Microsoft Research India.

Designing for illiterate populations involves a lot of challenges. As Toyama points out, “Indrani also discovered that illiterate subjects, because of their previous inexperience with computing, had other barriers to technology use, including intimidation by the technology, fear of breaking technology, and lack of mental models for how the technology worked. She devised the use of ‘full-context videos’ with content that featured not only instructional material, but a mini-story about how the technology worked in a real-life scenario.”

During her research work, Medhi also discovered a host of nuanced issues beyond strict usability. “Such issues include cognitive difficulties, collaboration, cultural etiquette, experience and exposure, intimidation, mediation, motivation, pricing, power relations, social standing, and others. These factors can have far-reaching influence on the design of UIs as well as services for low-literate populations,” she says.

Medhi is now conducting research in understanding characteristics of the cognitive styles of those with little formal education and how that has implications for UI design.