These are the papers and books I've been researching for my upcoming presentation:

• Technology for Social Inclusion, Mark. Warschauer
• Assistive Technology- Shaping the future, Ger M.Craddock
• Designing E-Learning, Saul Carliner
• Pawar, U. S., Pal, J. (accepted, 2006). Multiple mice for computers in education in developing countries, IEEE/ACM Int’l Conf. on Information & Communication Technologies for Development, 2006.
• Rangaswamy, N. and K. Toyama. (2005) Sociology of ICTs: the Myth of the Hybernating Village. HCI International 2005 (Las Vegas), July 2005
• Medhi, I., Sagar, A. and Toyama K. (2006) Text-Free User Interfaces for Illiterate and Semi-Literate Users. International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development (Berkeley, USA), May 2006
• Computers Helping People with Special Needs,10th International Conference, ICCHP 2006, Linz, Austria, July 11-13, 2006, Proceedings
• http://developer.yahoo.com/ypatterns/
• Report of the "Linguistic Support" Working Group, James R. Cordy, Ralph D. Hill, Gurminder Singh, and Brad Vander Zanden

The questions I am trying to answer are as follows-
1. How do we design interfaces for those who can barely read and write?
2. Is education always the answer to overcome the digital divide?
3. Can top-down approaches work, whereby interactive technologies are designed specifically to meet needs of those who are not literate nor economically strong?
4. How different would these interfaces be from those you and I are familiar with?
5. How can the concept of say a job-search application or an ATM be translated to a visual system that allows an illiterate person to interact with, given very little assistance?
6. What cues can we take from the culture of a person's community, while visualizing interfaces for those with special-needs?

My research for COGS 234 with Ed Hutchins strives to answer the first three questions. COGS 220, has given me the opportunity to tackle the last three. The area is very broad and involves plenty of ethnographical study and insight into practises of communities. However I am trying to boil down my understanding to specific groups and specific applications. There are plenty of work going on today, especially targeting the rural population of South Asia. For instance, the Grammteller project in IIT, Chennai used bio-metric fingerprint censors to log-in users to an ATM machine, a slick technology that we in developed nations have still not been able to incorporate into our ATMs! The concept of using "thumb-impression" is very common in rural India, and this analogy is well translated into technology.

This is just one instance of numerous culture-friendly cues to designing user-interfaces. I am really excited to have dived into this area of research. Some of these papers are pretty interesting and offer a bit of an introduction to the area:

1. Bridging or broadening the digital divide: interfacing the experience of learning for the next decade Ben Williamson, Futurelab (Becta website, 2003)
2. Matt Huenerfauth. 2002. Design Approaches for Developing User-Interfaces Accessible to Illiterate Users. Intelligent and Situation-Aware Media and Presentations Workshop. American Association of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI2002) Conference, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.
3. Marshini Chetty , William Tucker , Edwin Blake, Developing locally relevant software applications for rural areas: a South African example, Proceedings of the 2004 annual research conference of the South African institute of computer scientists and information technologists on IT research in developing countries, p.239-243, October 04-06, 2004, Stellenbosch, Western Cape, South Africa
4. Medhi, I., Pitti, B. and Toyama K. (2005) A Text-Free User Interface for Employment Search Asian Applied Computing Conference (Nepal), December 2005

Readings for 10/19

In the paper titled "Design of 3-D Visualization of Search Results" the authors have carefully analyzed the pros and cons of various visualizations that would aid designers approaching document visualizations. What all the prototypes had in common was that theyseem to lay emphasis on bringing together keywords that shared a meaning. This inevitably led to the problems of clustering and how to represent clusters without imposing a cognitive over-load on the user. The evolution of the 3-D model seemed to solve the problem to a certain extent. Although the direct motivation was to allow the user to see several titles at once, it seems tasking to distinguish so much text that are not very distant, given the limitation of screen space available to represent them. I personally feel many of the prototypes were over-designed for the problem at hand. It seemed to me that the user was not the center of the design but the design itself was in focus, the user's job is moved to making judgements on whether a design worked for him or not.

In the Concept Globe Design, they talk about embedding 2D navigation within the 3D globe representation. This is specially useful when the user wants to inspect a cluster, giving the option to "decide whether to display just an overview of the entire result set, or show details selectively". Also, it would have been a better reading if, in the conclusion, they had elaborated more on the concept of "restructuring", because that seemed to be the key to an better visualization.

I all sold for the idea of adding context to search results, especially if searching for something specific, when I have only a vague idea of where my search fits in. Context gives me cognitive cues that would improve my navigational speed across sites and make me narrow down my choices, accelerating decision-making. What would be cool for me, is that while I'm entering my keyword, categories relevant to my search are displayed and I can narrow down my categories and then continue search. However it could make interesting research to find ways to tackle the situation of results that can appear in multiple categories. This may add to an additional level of complexity for the user to navigate through.