Designing a graphical user interface for healthcare workers in rural India
Proceedings of the ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human factors in computing systems
Keylekh: a keyboard for text entry in indic scripts
CHI '04 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Tamil market: a spoken dialog system for rural India
CHI '06 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Designing an architecture for delivering mobile information services to the rural developing world
Proceedings of the 15th international conference on World Wide Web
Social dynamics of early stage co-design in developing regions
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Optimal audio-visual representations for illiterate users of computers
Proceedings of the 16th international conference on World Wide Web
eSagu™: a data warehouse enabled personalized agricultural advisory system
Proceedings of the 2007 ACM SIGMOD international conference on Management of data
iShakti--Crossing the Digital Divide in Rural India
WI '06 Proceedings of the 2006 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Web Intelligence
Developmental informatics at IIT Bombay
ACM SIGMOD Record
SIGIR '07 Proceedings of the 30th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval
Very low-cost internet access using KioskNet
ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review
VoiKiosk: increasing reachability of kiosks in developing regions
Proceedings of the 17th international conference on World Wide Web
Wireless sensor networking for rain-fed farming decision support
Proceedings of the second ACM SIGCOMM workshop on Networked systems for developing regions
Rangoli: a visual phonebook for low-literate users
Proceedings of the 10th international conference on Human computer interaction with mobile devices and services
Auditory icons: using sound in computer interfaces
Human-Computer Interaction
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More than 70% of the Indian population resides in rural area. This non-English speaking population practices agriculture as the main livelihood. Although farmers in India possess deep knowledge about traditional agricultural practices, they often lack immediate, contextual and real time access to vital factual information such as the current market prices for specific produce at their local agro-market, seed procurement, pest management, real-time updates on weather conditions etc. We designed and tested "Krishi-Mitra", a user-centered ICT (Information and Communication Technology) solution that aims to revolutionize the rural farming communities in India by providing seamless access to vital agricultural information. We envisage "Krishi Mitra" as a user-centered information system with an easy to use, efficient, scalable, community oriented design that aims to promote professional growth of the rural farmers. The user interface of Krishi- Mitra is thoughtfully designed using audio- visual-textual cues and familiar high affordance metaphors that are easily understood not just by literate but also by the illiterate and semi-literate farmers. It supplements direct two-way interaction between farmers and agricultural experts, thus eliminating possible exploitation of farmers through deceitful intermediaries. To scaffold this design endeavor, we conducted rapid ethnographic research to uncover a deeper understanding of the information needs of rural farmers in two different districts in the State of Maharashtra in India. In this paper, we introduce the interface design of Krishi-Mitra realized through a conceptual prototype and discuss qualitative usability testing results of the User Interface of Krishi-Mitra conducted with five farmers in the Ahmadnagar district of Maharashtra in India. We believe that the findings and discussions from this case study will prove useful to interface designers and user researchers to inform and guide future work in this important area.