SKC Science & Technology Webinar

Designing for Low-Literate Users

Date/Time: Saturday, November 20, 2021, 6:00pm Indian Standard Time

Speaker: Indrani Medhi Thies, Principal Researcher, Microsoft Research, India

Recording at: https://youtu.be/9fo7nOtjef0

Abstract: More than 770 million people in the world are completely non-literate and many are able to read only with great difficulty and effort. Even though mobile phone penetration is growing very fast, people with low levels of literacy have been found to avoid complex functions, and primarily use mobile phones for voice communication only. "Text-Free UIs" are design principles and recommendations for computer-human interfaces that would allow a first-time, non-literate person, on first contact with a PC or a mobile phone, to immediately realize useful interaction with minimal or no external assistance. We followed an ethnographic design and iterative prototyping process involving hundreds of hours spent in the field among low-income, low-literate communities across rural and urban India, the Philippines and South Africa.

Bio: Indrani Medhi Thies is Principal researcher, Technology for Emerging Markets Group, Microsoft Research India. She is currently based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. Her primary work has been on user interface design for low-literate and novice technology users such as her work on text-free user interface design. She was named to MIT TR35 (MIT Technology Reviews' Innovators under 35) in 2013, was awarded ACM SIGCHI Social Impact award in 2017, and was listed in “50 Smartest People in Technology” by Fortune magazine in 2010. She obtained her Ph.D. in Industrial Design from IIT Bombay, India, her Masters degree in Design from the Illinois Institute of Technology, USA, and her Bachelors degree in Architecture from VNIT, Nagpur, India.

Target Audience: This is for a wider audience. In particular, higher secondary and college students and teachers are welcome.

This webinar will be conducted over Zoom. The Zoom link will be available to registrants (sent to their email addresses) shortly before the webinar starts.

This webinar is part of SKC Science and Technology Webinar Series.

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