Using HCI to leverage communication technology
interactions - Winds of change
Contextual and cultural challenges for user mobility research
Communications of the ACM - Designing for the mobile device
How do you manage your contacts if you can't read or write?
interactions - Waits & Measures
Cinderella or Cyberella?: Empowering Women in the Knowledge Society
Cinderella or Cyberella?: Empowering Women in the Knowledge Society
Hci for community and international development
CHI '08 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Empowering women weavers? the internet in rural morocco
Information Technologies and International Development
Empowerment zones? women, internet cafés, and life transformations in egypt
Information Technologies and International Development
Where there's a will there's a way: mobile media sharing in urban india
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
SymAB: symbol-based address book for the semi-literate mobile user
INTERACT'07 Proceedings of the 11th IFIP TC 13 international conference on Human-computer interaction
Motivational needs-driven mobile phone design
INTERACT'07 Proceedings of the 11th IFIP TC 13 international conference on Human-computer interaction
Considering failure: eight years of ITID research
Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development
Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development
IHCI'10 Proceedings of the 2010 international conference on Interaction Design & International Development
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The proliferation of text-based applications in the Mobiles for Development (M4D) domain tends to privilege the conventional wisdom that texting is a ubiquitous skill among mobile phone users. This view obscures many real and present barriers to using SMS and mobile features, most critically where low literate and/or oral language-dependent communities cannot rely on text as a viable communications system. This paper investigates mobile "utility gaps" -- the spaces between high rates of mobile phone ownership and low use of productive features on mobile phones. These gaps preclude the adoption of many text-based development initiatives, which in turn affects the potential impact of such initiatives. Working with low-literate Berber-Muslim women in a predominantly oral-language community in rural southwest Morocco, we have found that an overall lack of functional literacy and numeracy is a major contributor to a mobile utility gap in that community. Non-standard mobile phone interfaces, a complex language environment with both Arabic and Berber dialects and multiple alphabets and gender-specific cultural norms also present significant impediments to using mobile phones as a development strategy in the Berber communities studied. Furthermore, we explore the paradox of social networks where a reliance on others to assist with phone use is often coupled with surveillance and a loss of privacy. These results are potentially relevant to projects involving other indigenous communities in North Africa.