William Thies

Designing mobile interfaces for novice and low-literacy users

While mobile phones have found broad application in bringing health, financial, and other services to the developing world, usability remains a major hurdle for novice and low-literacy populations. In this article, we take two steps to evaluate and improve the usability of mobile interfaces for such users. First, we offer an ethnographic study of the usability barriers facing 90 low-literacy subjects in India, Kenya, the Philippines, and South Africa. Then, via two studies involving over 70 subjects in India, we quantitatively compare the usability of different points in the mobile design space. In addition to text interfaces such as electronic forms, SMS, and USSD, we consider three text-free interfaces: a spoken dialog system, a graphical interface, and a live operator. Our results confirm that textual interfaces are unusable by first-time low-literacy users, and error prone for literate but novice users. In the context of healthcare, we find that a live operator is up to ten times more accurate than text-based interfaces, and can also be cost effective in countries such as India. In the context of mobile banking, we find that task completion is highest with a graphical interface, but those who understand the spoken dialog system can use it more quickly due to their comfort and familiarity with speech. We synthesize our findings into a set of design recommendations.

An empirical characterization of stream programs and its implications for language and compiler design

Stream programs represent an important class of high-performance computations. Defined by their regular processing of sequences of data, stream programs appear most commonly in the context of audio, video, and digital signal processing, though also in networking, encryption, and other areas. In order to develop effective compilation techniques for the streaming domain, it is important to understand the common characteristics of these programs. Prior characterizations of stream programs have examined legacy implementations in C, C++, or FORTRAN, making it difficult to extract the high-level properties of the algorithms. In this work, we characterize a large set of stream programs that was implemented directly in a stream programming language, allowing new insights into the high-level structure and behavior of the applications. We utilize the StreamIt benchmark suite, consisting of 65 programs and 33,600 lines of code. We characterize the bottlenecks to parallelism, the data reference patterns, the input/output rates, and other properties. The lessons learned have implications for the design of future architectures, languages and compilers for the streaming domain.

mClerk: enabling mobile crowdsourcing in developing regions

Global crowdsourcing platforms could offer new employment opportunities to low-income workers in developing countries. However, the impact to date has been limited because poor communities usually lack access to computers and the Internet. This paper presents mClerk, a new platform for mobile crowdsourcing in developing regions. mClerk sends and receives tasks via SMS, making it accessible to anyone with a low-end mobile phone. However, mClerk is not limited to text: it leverages a little-known protocol to send small images via ordinary SMS, enabling novel distribution of graphical tasks. Via a 5-week deployment in semi-urban India, we demonstrate that mClerk is effective for digitizing local-language documents. Usage of mClerk spread virally from 10 users to 239 users, who digitized over 25,000 words during the study. We discuss the social ecosystem surrounding this usage, and evaluate the potential of mobile crowdsourcing to both deliver and derive value from users in developing regions.

Yours is better!: participant response bias in HCI

Although HCI researchers and practitioners frequently work with groups of people that differ significantly from themselves, little attention has been paid to the effects these differences have on the evaluation of HCI systems. Via 450 interviews in Bangalore, India, we measure participant response bias due to interviewer demand characteristics and the role of social and demographic factors in influencing that bias. We find that respondents are about 2.5x more likely to prefer a technological artifact they believe to be developed by the interviewer, even when the alternative is identical. When the interviewer is a foreign researcher requiring a translator, the bias towards the interviewers artifact increases to 5x. In fact, the interviewers artifact is preferred even when it is degraded to be obviously inferior to the alternative. We conclude that participant response bias should receive more attention within the CHI community, especially when designing for underprivileged populations.

Evaluating and improving the usability of Mechanical Turk for low-income workers in India

While platforms such as Amazon Mechanical Turk have generated excitement as a potential source of income in developing regions, to date there remains little evidence that such opportunities have transformed livelihoods for low-income workers. In this study, we analyze the usability barriers that prevent those with basic digital literacy skills from accomplishing simple tasks on Mechanical Turk. Based on our observations, we design new user interfaces that reduce the barriers to task comprehension and execution. Via a study of 49 low-income workers in urban India, we demonstrate that new design elements -- including simplified user interfaces, simplified task instructions, and language localization -- are absolutely necessary to enable low-income workers to participate in and earn money using Mechanical Turk. We synthesize our findings into a set of design recommendations, as well as a realistic analysis of the potential for microtasking sites to deliver supplemental income to lower-income communities.

Emergent practices around CGNet Swara, voice forum for citizen journalism in rural India

Rural communities in India are often underserved by the mainstream media. While there is a public discourse surrounding the issues they face, this dialogue typically takes place on television, in newspaper editorials, and on the Internet. Unfortunately, participation in such forums is limited to the most privileged members of society, excluding those individuals who have the largest stake in the conversation. This paper examines an effort to foster a more inclusive dialogue by means of a simple technology: an interactive voice forum. Called CGNet Swara, the system enables callers to record messages of local interest, and listen to messages that others have recorded. Messages are also posted on the Internet, as a supplement to an existing discussion forum. In the first 21 months of its deployment in India, CGNet Swara has logged over 70,000 phone calls and released 1,100 messages. To understand the emergent practices surrounding this system, we conduct interviews with 42 diverse stakeholders, including callers, bureaucrats, and members of the media. Our analysis contributes to the understanding of voice-based media as a vehicle for social inclusion in remote and underprivileged populations.

Sangeet Swara: A Community-Moderated Voice Forum in Rural India

Interactive voice forums have emerged as a promising platform for people in developing regions to record and share audio messages using low-end mobile phones. However, one of the barriers to the scalability of voice forums is the process of screening and categorizing content, often done by a dedicated team of moderators. We present Sangeet Swara, a voice forum for songs and cultural content that relies on the community of callers to curate high-quality posts that are prioritized for playback to others. An 11-week deployment of Sangeet Swara found broad and impassioned usage, especially among visually impaired users. We also conducted a follow-up experiment, called Talent Hunt, that sought to reduce reliance on toll-free telephone lines. Together, our deployments span about 53,000 calls from 13,000 callers, who submitted 6,000 posts and 150,000 judgments of other content. Using a mixed-methods analysis of call logs, audio content, comparison with outside judges, and 204 automated phone surveys, we evaluate the user experience, the strengths and weaknesses of community moderation, financial sustainability, and the implications for future systems.

Biocoder: A programming language for standardizing and automating biology protocols.

BackgroundPublished descriptions of biology protocols are often ambiguous and incomplete, making them difficult to replicate in other laboratories. However, there is increasing benefit to formalizing the descriptions of protocols, as laboratory automation systems (such as microfluidic chips) are becoming increasingly capable of executing them. Our goal in this paper is to improve both the reproducibility and automation of biology experiments by using a programming language to express the precise series of steps taken.ResultsWe have developed BioCoder, a C++ library that enables biologists to express the exact steps needed to execute a protocol. In addition to being suitable for automation, BioCoder converts the code into a readable, English-language description for use by biologists. We have implemented over 65 protocols in BioCoder; the most complex of these was successfully executed by a biologist in the laboratory using BioCoder as the only reference. We argue that BioCoder exposes and resolves ambiguities in existing protocols, and could provide the software foundations for future automation platforms. BioCoder is freely available for download at http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/india/projects/biocoder/.ConclusionsBioCoder represents the first practical programming system for standardizing and automating biology protocols. Our vision is to change the way that experimental methods are communicated: rather than publishing a written account of the protocols used, researchers will simply publish the code. Our experience suggests that this practice is tractable and offers many benefits. We invite other researchers to leverage BioCoder to improve the precision and completeness of their protocols, and also to adapt and extend BioCoder to new domains.

Computer-aided design for microfluidic chips based on multilayer soft lithography

Microfluidic chips are emerging as a powerful platform for automating biology experiments. As it becomes possible to integrate tens of thousands of components on a single chip, researchers will require design automation tools to push the scale and complexity of their designs to match the capabilities of the substrate. However, to date such tools have focused only on droplet-based devices, leaving out the popular class of chips that are based on multilayer soft lithography. In this paper, we develop design automation techniques for microfluidic chips based on multilayer soft lithography. We focus our attention on the control layer, which is driven by pressure actuators to invoke the desired flows on chip. We present a language in which designers can specify the Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) of a microfluidic device. Given an ISA, we automatically infer the locations of valves needed to implement the ISA. We also present novel algorithms for minimizing the number of control lines needed to drive the valves, as well as for routing valves to control ports while admitting sharing between the control lines. To the microfluidic community, we offer a free computer-aided design tool, Micado, which implements a subset of our algorithms as a practical plug-in to AutoCAD. Micado is being used successfully by microfluidic designers. We demonstrate its performance on three realistic chips.

VidWiki: enabling the crowd to improve the legibility of online educational videos

Videos are becoming an increasingly popular medium for communicating information, especially for online education. Recent efforts by organizations like Coursera, edX, Udacity and Khan Academy have produced thousands of educational videos with hundreds of millions of views in their attempt to make high quality teaching available to the masses. As a medium, videos are time-consuming to produce and cannot be easily modified after release. As a result, errors or problems with legibility are common. While text-based information platforms like Wikipedia have benefitted enormously from crowdsourced contributions for the creation and improvement of content, the various limitations of video hinder the collaborative editing and improvement of educational videos. To address this issue, we present VidWiki, an online platform that enables students to iteratively improve the presentation quality and content of educational videos. Through the platform, users can improve the legibility of handwriting, correct errors, or translate text in videos by overlaying typeset content such as text, shapes, equations, or images. We conducted a small user study in which 13 novice users annotated and revised Khan Academy videos. Our results suggest that with only a small investment of time on the part of viewers, it may be possible to make meaningful improvements in online educational videos.