Next Billion Online

H C Hear

Create

D Deliver

Human Centered Design

GOOGLE-INK,

NEXT BILLION ONLINE PROJECT A Project description

Prajakta Kulkarni Graduation Project 2012-2013

Human Centered Design Human centered design is defined as “an approach to systems design and development that aims to make interactive systems more usable by focusing on the use of the system and applying human factors/ergonomics and usability knowledge and techniques”.

ISO 9241-210 specifically recommends six characteristics: • The adoption of multidisciplinary skills and perspectives • Explicit understanding of users, tasks and environments • User-centered evaluation driven/refined design • Consideration of the whole user experience • Involvement of users throughout design and development • Iterative process In broad terms, human centered design (HCD) is a design philosophy and a process in which the needs, wants, and limitations of end users of a product are given extensive attention at each stage of the design process.

Human centered design can be characterized as a multi-stage problem solving process that not only requires designers to analyze and foresee how users are likely to use a product, but also to test the validity of their assumptions with regards to user behavior in real world tests with actual users. Such testing is necessary as it is often very difficult for the designers of a product to understand intuitively what a first-time user of their design experiences, and what each user’s learning curve may look like.

The chief difference from other product design philosophies is that user-centered design tries to optimize the product around how users can, want, or need to use the product, rather than forcing the users to change their behavior to accommodate the product.

Reference source : Wikipedia.org, http://hcdi.brunel.ac.uk/

HCD

Clients

INKtalks.com For the last 3 years, every winter, a few hundred influencers from India and around the world gather together for an inspiration of a different kind. The stories, ideas and perspectives shared here inspire you, expand your mind and call you to action.

Under this forum, ‘The INK Conference in association with TED’, a new community of inspired thinkers and doers is being formed and is rapidly growing. They are developing strong bonds within because these are people that have a limited opportunity to meet someplace else. It ranges from artists, scientists, designers, technologists, explorers, businessmen and many more. In includes speakers, fellows and participants and is very egalitarian.

Log on to www.inktalks.com, for more details

Google.co.in The official mission statement of the company is to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”

Google was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were students at Stanford University. The company was officially launched in September, 1998 in a friend’s garage.

In one of the most anticipated Initial Public Offerings (IPO) Google raised $1.67 billion in August of 2004. Today, Google has over 12,000 employees in offices throughout the world.

Reference source : http://www.google.co.in/about/company/products/

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H Client Brief In March’12, Lakshmi Pratury from INKtalks, initiated a partnership with the company, Google. To highlight this partnership, they came up with a Human Centered design Project to understand a process, to get the Next Billion Indians Online.

Out of 1.2 billion people in this country, only 10 million are Online. That leaves a little more than 90% of India’s population. This left Google with a problem statement to encourage Indians to use Internet. INKtalks being a service that provides platforms to evangelists and entrepreneurs, both Online and on stages, it faced a similar problem of lack of audience.

Information circulation, communication, content generation and supply of knowledge gets restricted, in case of lack of Internet. From a social point of view, India as a country will benefit on a very massive scale with one billion of them using the Internet as a source of information and knowledge. From a corporate point of view, Google gets more traffic on their websites and INKtalks gets a larger audience for its stories.

Thus, this project rose. It began as a philosophy and now is being tested as a Communication System. The team was selected from different backgrounds such as management, social entrepreneurship, engineering, commerce and design.

1) “To create an Online, self-sustaining, content generating ecosystem�

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H After conducting various experiments and surveys, we came to a conclusion of selecting areas / communities as our target audience, instead of user profiles and people.

A community which has the following : Socio -cultural parameters

The area you pick may be economically backward or socially backward or both. If the people are poor but willing to learn, co-operate and are sensitive to their surroundings they are socially forward - relatively easy to work with, likely to get more inspirational stories. Some areas are economically better off, but socially backward, this kind of environment is harder to work in, it may lead to bad mouthing and bad blood among people.

Indicators

Presence of an Resident’s Welfare Association is indicative of a socially well connected and forward area, especially if the same is active in civic issues. General cleanliness of surroundings indicate social awareness and sensitivity, Clean cable lines, fixed meters, electric wires etc are indicators of a socially aware area and are easier to work with.

Size

Choose the radius of coverage depending on the density of population in each area. In case the density is higher, choose a smaller radius and vice versa.

Homogeneity

In some areas, there is a variation in the socio-economic status of the population, choose the portion of the population that is somewhat homogeneous. If there is too much variation, then divide the area in two or three parts and approach one at a time. You will need to modify your approach with each.

2) Preliminary Experiments and surveys

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H We conducted surveys and experiments throughout Bangalore and Hubli city to understand what exactly the audience needs.

This is the part in Human Centered Design, where we “Hear� to the complains and empathize on the problems of audience.

Surveys :

Initial surveys were conducted in order to understand different ways of conducting surveys.

After conducting a series of surveys, we came to a conclusion that AWARENESS is one of the major problems people face in using Internet.

Hence, we decided to tackle that problem by creating awareness in schools.

In this model, we designed a pattern which will encourage and excite students enough to spread this message ahead to their elders.

Preliminary Experiments :

We conducted a series of experiments in 7 different schools, with over 900 students to test sustainability models. These schools were mainly low-income schools with considerably openminded teaching methods.

In the first 4 schools, systems were essentially designed to educate the students about the use of Internet and the affordability.

In the next 3 schools, we used methods to generate curiosity and understand if they enjoy feeding it with Google answers.

This Idea-run experiment was turned into an event to promote the Project and understand how audience reacts to usage of Internet for education purpose.

Story Collection experiment :

This was an experiment that we wished to roll over different age groups of audiences. We wanted to understand if people are eager enough to see their work or their story being published Online in the form of video.

We concluded that this works in a model if the video and the story is made in better quality and it comes with a certain time difference.

Materials: Posters, pamphlets, certificates,

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H Welcomes you and your family for an event where ideas spring to life.

ADMIT Family Date: 21 - 08 - 2012 Venue : Deshpande Auditorium Time: entry 4:45 pm

___________________________

Raffle to enter for a surprise gift

Welcomes you and your family for an event where ideas spring to life.

Mobile #: __________________

ADMIT Family

Email: _____________________

Date: 21 - 08 - 2012 Venue : Deshpande Auditorium Time: entry 4:45 pm

___________________________

Info about Yourself: __________

INKtalks Despande Auditorium Despande Centre for Social Entrepreneurship BVBR College of Engineering Vidyanagar HUBLI 580025 Contact : Prakash 7259032775

Raffle to enter for a surprise gift

Design for Change: “Smile” project

Medha Krishnan

A silver medalist in Civil Engineering follows her true calling in the social sector for education, nurturing many young lives. She goes on to build a community centre for enabling children to use computer technology.

Conducted by, INKtara A Google-INK program

Name: ____________________

CJSS school students

In association with Deshpande Foundation

Info about Yourself: __________

INKtalks Despande Auditorium Despande Centre for Social Entrepreneurship BVBR College of Engineering Vidyanagar HUBLI 580025 Contact : Prakash 7259032775

This homemaker - turned organic farmer, believes that innovation is the lifeblood in every field of work. She’s a mother of two, MA Phil.,PGdip.Yoga and now up for a Phd.

Conducted by, INKtara A Google-INK program

Mobile #: __________________ Email: _____________________

Susheela Patil

In association with Deshpande Foundation

Name: ____________________

Target audience was mainly children and their parents. The colors and illustrations were made to attract children towards attending Internet Benefit classes and events.

3) First Prototype : Campaign Communication Design

Lead20:

20 Women were selected out of 100 who wished to participate. These women were taught how to use different Online tools for their daily education and entertainment.

These women were also taught how to teach these simple usage of Internet to five women each. This model was designed to sustainably spread a message of Internet awareness and affordability through house-to-house marketing model.

House decoration Competition:

We designed a Competition in order to “kick-start” a campaign to make women and children aware of the Lead20 program being started and get them “geared-up” for Internet. They were asked to make Diwali decorations to their houses, click pictures and put up the pictures on a website which we had mentioned.

Women participated on a very large scale. They drew rangoli and posted Online, with a voting system which made this competition more interesting to them.

Campaign:

A multi-medium campaign was designed mainly for the competition but it was designed in a way that it promoted Lead20 program and Internet usage.

Different material that got generated in this manner were posters, banners, pamphlets, radio messages, word-of-mouth messages, videos shown on streets, mini events in market areas and incentives for more entries.

Community center:

We designed a low-budget community center for a 1.2km radius community, with the encouragement and funding from its Corporator. This made it very easy for the Lead20 to sustain their Internet education.

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C Our first Prototype was essentially designed for women and children of a certain community, one in Bangalore and one in Hubli, both being semi urban areas. Here, we wanted to start a self-sustaining, content generating ecosystem, with various essential Online tools, such as Gmail, YouTube, Facebook, WhatsApp, Google Search and Google Translate.

Materials: Posters, pamphlets, certificates, illustration

Decorate your house

Take a picture

Upload it on inktalks.com/blog/jogupalya Become popular on votes

Win prizes woth Rs.10,000!!

C re at e

C The target audience was such that they did not respond to English posters and advertisements. The posters had to be made after keeping all the women and children from economically and socially backward communities in mind.

To attract such people, during diwali it was very important to have our “creatives� stand out amongst all the other diwali campaigns around (which was in 100s). Thus, it was made as colorful and attractive as possible. They actually attracted many people and it made them curious about the events and organisations conducting the competition.

4) After testing: Campaign Communication Design had problems*

Bangalore, which involved an entire Ward of 1.2km radius, and Akshaya Colony in Hubli, which involved about 500-700 houses.

Lead20 & House decoration competition:

The model was very successful in Hubli and is still being sustained by the members of Akshaya Colony. They were extremely eager to understand and convey our message about Internet through all the possible techniques.

Unfortunately, only 4 out of 20 women actually understood the message that we wanted to spread in Jougupalya. They were more interested in how much it would benefit their incomes and job profiles. Although they learnt the methods very efficiently, they were not ready to sustain such a session as volunteers. Hence, it did not work quite well.

The methods we used, for women were too simplified. They became opportunists when it came to gifts and prizes. The women took much more time to learn than children. This made them lose interest in the importance of the sessions.

Campaign:

Although campaign was very useful in creating attention and attracting almost 1000 women to participate, the message about Internet usage and Lead20 wasn’t conveyed. They were very eager to participate and win “exciting prizes�. Post competition and prize distribution, the women forgot about Internet and its benefits.

Community center:

Although the design of this community center was made to the mark, the corporator delayed the funding so much that by then the women had completely lost interest. They no longer wished to have a free Internet facility, they wanted more incentives.

This gave us an insight about having a very long and complex system. There were too many sides to one message. Instead of the message being the medium, our medium became the message.

C re at e

C *We had pointed out two major communities. Jougupalya area in

Mind mapping

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5) “To create a communication system that answers to the problems regarding Internet, affordability, accessibility, availability and awareness.�

We believe,

1. A clear set of guidelines along with a structured curriculum will augment effective outreach (‘Awareness’) 2. That we must understand the perspective from the ground-level (community members’ points-of-view) to develop a clear idea to involve a community’s key stakeholders to ensure balanced & pro-active participation (‘Accessibility’) 3. It is imperative to work with partners in order to effectively roll-out & experiment with a blueprint for digital literacy across geographies (‘Availability’) 4. Working with local businesses related to IT/Mobile products & Internet connectivity will assist subsequent self-sustenance of the eco-system (‘Affordability’)

We are driving towards entrusting experimentation of this blueprint across volunteer communities that can share their feedback, for us to fine-tune the blueprint & facilitate the journey for the next billion into the world of the Internet.

C re at e

C Redefined the problem statement. We pointed out the experiments which showed highest success and sustainability probability. This even took us back to all the surveys we conducted. After going through the points we divided out problem statement into four parts, Accessibility, Affordability, Availability and Awareness of Internet.

6) E-nabling Curriculum Design

The ten day curriculum can be used by anyone whether you are a teacher with a class of 60 students to an independent adult learner. If you are a complete novice our advice is to run through the curriculum in chronological order as each day builds upon the learnings of the last.

Each day we run through the teaching methods, provide a basic checklist of the equipment you will need, the learning objectives for the day, the Do’s and Don’ts from our own learnings and a page to record your insights and feedback.

To start with our curriculum aims to be a self evolving system which would eventually help facilitators from different organisations working together on sharing their feedback and insights on these progressive experiments.

Volunteers, students and facilitators will form the backbone of this feedback system which will help the partner organisations as well as other interested parties to gain an understanding of the current trends and create their own strategies towards addressing the issues faced by them in attracting their target audience.

It would enable our overall goal of bringing together organisations which work on improving Internet literacy or might be a IT infrastructure provider who in turn can use these insights to better their approach towards the market and understand the dynamics of a specific ecosystem that they would like to target.

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C This curriculum is targeted at first time users who may have never used a computer itself. We run through the basics of the peripherals of a computer before launching into tasks such as completing a google search, creating an email account and using the Internet as a key communication tool.

Materials: Curriculum Publication Layout

Page margins for printing as well as web publication Text color, font and size variable All right pages in white and left in gray

Glypha LT Bold used for headings and Titles.

Glypha LT Roman used for notes and tips Unit Regular and Unit Bold used for body text.

Y-39 C-35 C-51 K-67 K-100

The fonts were used as guidelines from INKtalks to follow its brand identity. The colors mainly chosen (gray, blue and yellow) are to show education, innocence and freedom of thought, the main lines on which this curriculum is designed.

In each day’s design, there had to be a few elements - The Day, title, subtitles, Activities, Notes and Tips to be highlighted while reading the activity process. It was important to fit everything in one spread to make sure the interest is intact throughout.

C re at e

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Start of sub-text, after heading space

Materials: Curriculum Publication Illustrations and Charts

C re at e

C To make this curriculum handbook brighter and more interesting, I illustrated the activities of every day by sketches. This removed the factor of monotony.

Materials: Posters and Certificates

C re at e

C Along with the Curriculum, the kit includes a few other things. It includes soft copies for certificate, chart, posters (in nine different languages), 10 daily assessment sheets, Excel file for Rubric an example of a filled Rubric. These are essential for a feedback which is extremely important for us to understand the impact of the Curriculum that we have designed such.

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D The Curriculum has been shared Online, issuu.com portal, for its promotion. Different organisations, willing to facilitate this curriculum, contacted us. In exchange of using it, they have to send us a rubric measurement filled and feedbacks from facilitators and users.

7) rea

Video Stories Program

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The program is divided in a 7 stage process.

Step 1:

Select Area > 1 day

Community where they will take the video/story from

Step 2:

Select Person/Story > 2 days

The relevant person/story for their knowledge and benefit

Step 3:

Curating > 4 days

The ideal art of storytelling in a step by step process

Step 4:

Shoot .> 3 days

From planning location to shooting and recording the story

Step 5:

Upload Approval.> 2 days

After an approval from a management representative, they upload video on YouTube

Step 6:

Showcase > 1 day

They showcase the video in the community for creating awareness about Internet, and then in their college for knowledge purpose.

Step 7:

Utilize > 2 days

The volunteer plans and executes simple ways to make the program sustainable in his/her environment as an end activity

C re at e

C This program is designed for the purpose of getting videos Online through student communities and local businesses to generate Online content.

It is designed with an aim to find the two USPs of Google and INKtalks together, to get people generate Online content through awareness and affordability communicated. It also conveys availability and accessibility through the medium of video content.

8) Next steps We will be now waiting for the results of these two Prototypes to come. We would evaluate them and measure the impact through the number of people that have been made aware with these two tools - E-nabling Curriculum and Video Stories program.

According to the experiments that we have conducted so far, we have realized that our motive to use “Message as medium� is being fulfilled. Our message for Internet literacy is spreading on an average of 67% each experiment. At this rate, we are expecting an impact of about 2 million people in the year 2013.

Ofcourse, after making changes, from feedbacks that we receive, the programs would be more efficient and would impact a much higher number.

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HCD Hear

Create

Deliver