Much to newspapers? chagrin, these days everyone advertises and looks for work online. But how do you find work if you can?t read? Here, the new generation of touchscreen computers is light-years ahead of newsprint.
That?s the premise of Indian jobs site Babajob.com, with help from Microsoft Research?s ethnographic UI expert Indrani Medhi.
Besides the informal labor market, Medhi has also deployed and studied the use of text-free interfaces in mapping, mobile banking, and disseminating health information. Since many parts of the developing world are adopting mobile phones without books or traditional PCs, the implications of widespread text-free mobile computing applications are tremendous.
Medhi?s research is not just technological but anthropological, as the ?ethnographic UI? phrase implies. Speech, for instance, is preferred over multimedia/video by her study subjects. The presence or absence of computing devices in the home has class implications. Medhi writes that her team is ?also trying to understand characteristics of the cognitive styles of those with little formal education and their implications for UI design for this population.? Hindi, for instance, is like English read from left to right. It?s natural for us to arrange pictures from left to right to show chronology or causality. It?s not necessarily intuitive to a nonreader.
The demo video above of Babajobs? text-free interface is in Hindi, without subtitles, but it?s not hard to make out what?s happening. (If you want to skip to the site in action, go to 2:50.) A middle-class couple is looking for domestic help. Meanwhile, one woman convinces another (who can?t read) that she can use a computer to find work. At the end, they find each other. Such a simple, happy story is easy to understand without letters or language.
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