Renaud’s Fingers of Fury & the Building of the Interface
12 mai 2006 in LMI, Hardware by Brennan Casey
Monday brought with it the beginnings of a bustling week. Of all the many happenings this week, from finalizing cost/pricing models for services to making a decision on who we were going to take on as a Cybertigi intern, the GCM team has been working from all angles to get Cybertigi ready for next week. Of all the work done, though, one area seemed to make the most progress of all: the kiosk.
Renaud, as always, has been skillfully piecing together the kiosk’s interface. At present he has the scanner/photocopy service nearly nailed down, the news feed reader nearly ready, the voice messaging program working, and is working on the email component now. The bulk of Renauld’s time recently has been on how to have the kiosks in our villages transfer all the various data elements to our hub in Ouelessebougou, create billing logs of each transaction, leave no chance of loss of information, work with limited storage space, and a dozen other limiting factors. It doesn’t help that Matt and I often ask for some revision shortly after Renaud has come up with a working model. We’re all anxious to field test his end product. We know we won’t be disappointed.
It’s also important to understand a little about the idea behind many parts of the kiosk and its interface. Because we are designing the Cybertigi system to offer services to people in remote communities, we have to understand who we are selling to and what their demands are. With respect to the kiosk’s interface these considerations are particularly relevant. We have to concede that we will be working in areas with very low literacy rates, disposable income will also be lower than in urban centers, few in our communities will ever have seen a computer – other than on television – let alone use one for email and voice messaging, and so forth. Not all clients will fall among this broad generalization, but the majority will.
Our goal in designing Cybertigi is to take as many of these factors into consideration as possible to create an overall system that works for as many people in our population of interest as possible. If the kiosk is designed properly and the logistics are well organized than we should be able to accommodate any person who has a willingness to use the system with very little outside intervention. By this I mean that if, for example, an illiterate youth who has never traveled outside of their village and only speaks the local language comes to the kiosk, he/she should be able to understand the system and carry out their transaction with ease and with little to no assistance in a matter of moments.
Here’s a shot of what the first screen to access the kiosk’s services might look like:
The kiosk interface is constructed with large, simple icons indicating each of the types of principal services: email – incoming and outgoing, voicemail, scanning/copying, and news feeds. The user merely clicks on the icon indicating their service and follows a very clear series of icons/steps to the completion of their task. For example, the 2 small shots in the above left show the scan/print service’s screen. Additionally, the kiosk manager is always present to assist any patrons who require assistance. One intention in using icons and an easy interface is to accelerate the kiosk’s learning curve. A person who doesn’t read French or Bambara will find it easier to remember a series of simple images than a complicated series of non-visual instructions.
We will also be conducting awareness campaigns in the villages to help people better understand what these technologies are, what services are being offered through the kiosk, how they can be used to improve communication and what their other benefits are, and how we can build on them to adapt to new types of services demanded in the future.
By early next week we will begin to install the solar panels and the kiosk in Faraba. At this time we will begin training our Malian liaison between the Bamako office and the sites on the system, who will then go on to train the entrepreneurs in the sites. During this time we will be field testing the interface and making any required adjustments and additions needed.
