In this paper, we aim to relate the design of WhatsApp with its adoption in developing countries and inform the design of future products. In the last two and a half years, a large number of 'emergent users' in India, have adopted WhatsApp. They have been able to do 'account holding' tasks with a greater ease, which means they establish social online identities, manage off-line communication, share and forward content, and create and join groups with less difficulty. WhatsApp has certain design based advantages over the conventional account holding applications whose adoption is not easy by the emergent users because ofcertain barriers. These barriers arise due to user characteristics like lack of technology exposure andlow levels of education and income. We used User-Usage model as a theoretical lens to understand how design features of WhatsApp may have helped the emergent users overcome the common barriers. This analysis was supported with the findings of contextual interviews done with 108 emergent users to understand their WhatsApp usage. We found that simplification of registration process and interaction mechanisms, reduction of choices, freeing users from cognitively intensive chores and sacrificing features that were less relevant in users' contexts were some of the ways through which the design of WhatsApp managed to remove barriers in adoption. This study helps us identify the design choices that could make other applications easier to adopt by the emergent users.

Making and Breaking the User-Usage Model: WhatsApp Adoption Amongst Emergent Users in India

With easy access to affordable internet-powered smartphones, developing countries are adopting smartphone applications to provide enabling services to its citizens, through eHealth, eGovernance, and digital payments. The challenge is to ensure equitable access to these services by everyone, including people with semi-literacy or low-literacy who form a large part of the population in developing countries. However, extensive HCI literature has identified literacy as one of the barriers to designing user interfaces. In this work, we propose a framework of actionable guidelines for designing smartphone UIs that would be usable by low-literate users. We reviewed the last two decades of HCI literature engaging people with low literacy, to synthesize our framework-designing SARAL. To evaluate the framework, we conducted a preliminary study with a group of 20 practitioners and researchers working in the field of UI/UX/HCI. We also analyzed six publicly available industry reports on designing UIs for people with low-literacy. The proposed guidelines intend to support researchers, practitioners, designers, and implementers in the design and evaluation of UIs of smartphone applications for people with low literacy. We present the evolutionary nature of the proposed framework while highlighting the importance of adopting a translational approach when building such frameworks.

Actionable UI Design Guidelines for Smartphone Applications Inclusive of Low-Literate Users

Recently several new solutions have emerged for text entry in Indic languages out ongoing research in this area. The practical challenges for text entry solutions for Indic language are completely different from those of standard roman keyboard solutions. One of the primary challenge is the adoption and practical usage of these by the potential users. In order to understand the practical pain points, needs, expectations and usage patterns of the users, we conducted a field user study. The scale of the study involved 50 participants from the preferred user group who could type in 6 different Indic language scripts. We also performed subjective evaluation of four different keyboards that are relevant for Indian smart phone users in terms of user performance and their preferences. Our observations and insights drawn from this study would go into improvement suggestions and design recommendations for text entry solutions for Indic languages.

Text Entry in Indian Languages on Mobile: User Perspectives

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) researchers are turning their attention towards supporting low-resource languages, such as isiXhosa or Marathi, with only limited training resources. We report and reflect on collaborative research across ASR & HCI to situate ASR-enabled technologies to suit the needs and functions of two communities of low-resource language speakers, on the outskirts of Cape Town, South Africa and in Mumbai, India. We build on longstanding community partnerships and draw on linguistics, media studies and HCI scholarship to guide our research. We demonstrate diverse design methods to: remotely engage participants; collect speech data to test ASR models; and ultimately field-test models with users. Reflecting on the research, we identify opportunities, challenges, and use-cases of ASR, in particular to support pervasive use of WhatsApp voice messaging. Finally, we uncover implications for collaborations across ASR & HCI that advance important discussions at CHI surrounding data, ethics, and AI.

https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3491102.3517639

Opportunities and Challenges of Automatic Speech Recognition Systems for Low-Resource Language Speakers

We were asked to evaluate input mechanisms for touch-screen devices with the objective of standardising one of them for each of 14 major languages of India. For this purpose, we propose a protocol that consists of a 45-minute long training session, a 20-word first-time usability test, and a longitudinal test consisting of about 30 sessions, each of which required the user to type about 10 phrases 4 to 6 words long (a total of 300 phrases). The evaluation should be done with school children from standards 4th to 7th. The course of the evaluation may last 2-4 weeks for each user. To help follow the protocol over this long period and to collate the data, we offer a tool. Currently, we provide test corpora for Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Marathi, Odia, Tamil, Telugu, and Urdu. We have ensured that each corpus represents a mix of informal communication between people, popular phrases from films, songs, poetry and public discourse, and formal texts from school books and literature. We have tagged each phrase according to typing difficulty, phrase length, and memorability and age appropriateness. We evaluated the protocol through pilot tests with 206 users in Marathi, Gujarati, Hindi, Bengali, Odia, Assamese and Tamil. In this paper, we present the original protocol, the detailed findings from the Marathi pilots, and the proposed modifications to the protocol.

A Protocol to Evaluate Virtual Keyboards for Indian Languages

Indian text input is an area which is now being studied by not only language experts but designers and developers. Since a decade there is work in progress for designs that are intended to develop easy and efficient keyboard for different Indian Languages scripts. Swarachakra (for android) is one novel attempt to resolve this problem. In our studies we found that alphabetical keyboard layout performed better than the Inscript layout for Devanagari Script.This case study discusses the evaluation and evolution of Swarachakra as virtual keyboard. It talks about the various degrees of usability testing which has been done to check its efficacy. User group included were students, adults and elder people with literacy level varying from graduate to low literate. The results of the study shows that with minimal training, a user is able to achieve acceptable comfort and speed with the logical design based keyboard.

Testing the efficacy of an Indic script virtual keyboard: Swarachakra

Swarachakra is a text input method developed for Indic scripts on touch-screen devices. Swarachakra uses a logically ordered design based on the structure of Indic scripts. Swarachakra displays the consonants sequenced according to the logical structure of Indic scripts, phonetically grouped and arranged in a grid similar to those found in most school textbooks. Currently we have launched Swarachakra for Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati, Kannada, Telugu, Malayalam, Odia and Punjabi (Gurmukhi) for Android devices.

Swarachakra keyboard for indic scripts (tutorial)

The mobile phone penetration in rural India is high and network prices are low. Usage of smartphones in rural areas is rising. However, information technology in general, and smartphones in particular are not being used for business purposes. While there is scope for developing localised business applications for rural India, there are very few Indian language business application terminologies that are commonly understood. We designed and developed an Android based business application in Hindi to manage logistics in a rural enterprise involving wild apricot oil. After the application evaluation with 11 rural users, we discovered that some terms worked well, while others do not. We also investigated the reasons why this happens. The lessons learnt from our study could be applied in contexts of other business applications in similar contexts.

Nirav Malsattar

Papers

Testing the efficacy of an Indic script virtual keyboard: Swarachakra

Swarachakra keyboard for indic scripts (tutorial)

Terminologies Used In Localized Mobile Application For Supply Chain Management In Rural India