I've put in the finishing touches for my draft and I'm almost ready to turn it in. On thursday I had a draft ready but I felt that a lot was incomplete. For example, Nooface.net has a lot of interesting ideas including 3D techniques which are viable alternatives to traditional iconic representation. I also did not consider including Mobile applications as a part of my research. Now I am convinced that given the dramatic leapfrog that third world communities have made in adopting to mobile technology, it shouldn't be surprising that the industry will target these communities as an emerging market for rich mobile applications. Furthermore, the limitations of visualization real-estate could be beneficial in that we are introducing information to the user screen-by-screen, rather than overloading the user with too much information, something a bigger screen could cause. The linear interactivity could offer better affordance. It would also be a less intimidating appliance to get used to. This would also be a good place to get illiterate user to begin learning to use digital applications. This would eventually ease the task of developers of computer applications who can now make design decisions assuming that their target user is more technology literate.

I also likes Derek's comment on my idea, calling community-oriented digital applications an "appliance". A "Web leaf" metaphor can translate to an appliance whereby each computer can support many web leaves, but will become an appliance to a user whose purpose is specified by the "web leaf". I'm trying to figure out the range of programs that can be expanded by the web leaf macro. But I'm yet to be convinced that this is a sustainable approach. What happens when a "web leaf" becomes redundant to a user who is now well-acquainted with using a computer for the very purpose he began to use a web leaf. What would happen when appliances are no longer needed? How would a user who is now accustomed to an appliance react when he moves to a city with appliances being too advanced for the nomadic user's cognition.

These are some of the issues that confront my proposal. This has caused me to think about the approach is a more unified manner- to make user-interfaces sustainable and well-replicable, the design must keep in mind the cultural and cognitive limitations of not just the target community, but also those of communities with the potential to adopt this technology. The potential user groups need not necessarily have common cultural and literacy characteristics of the group whom the system originally targeted. We will have to look into the pain that the system is solving and the range of communities which experience the same. For example, are only the fishermen in the X district of a state suffer because they do not have a device that will accurately forecast weather for the upcoming week? If fishermen from Y and Z districts, who speak different languages and have different literacy levels can also potentially reap the benefits of such a device, then while designing the interface of the appliance, the spectrum of usability characteristics must be kept in mind while creating the information visualization. Not only will this reduce the learning curve of users from Y and Z districts, it would be easier to deploy and sell these applications to other areas.

In retrospect, I really learned a lot from the discussion we had during my presentation. I wish I could have developed my idea on the Wiki a bit more by then. With that it would have been easier to run through my suggestions, without giving an impression that the ideas are being thrown into the air without supportive explanation. But then again it is only the beginning of a proposal! However, as I have developed it further, I feel that I can give a more substantial example associated with my ideas.