User-Centered Approach to Designing a User Interface for Rural Communities

This activity will focus on making informed design decisions using the insights distilled from in-field research initiatives. The key purpose of conducting this research is to distill current pain points, challenges, and explicit and tacit needs. These insights will be used to come up with design principles and share them to the community in the forms of research papers, blogs, etc. with the hope of encouraging discussion and increasing awareness. The same will also be piloted by beginning collaboration initiatives with organizations interested in catering to the needs of this community. The committee will work with the organization(s) to help them adopt the design principles for building prototypes for their diverse use cases. These prototypes will also be tested with end-users coming from diverse backgrounds and experiences. This research will help the team come up with a user segments and persona types collection that can be used as a tool when designing for rural communities. This activity develops a model for the design and implementation of user interfaces for rural communities. The development focuses on the design and evaluation of user interfaces by users with low levels of user interface experiences and computer literacy.

The goal of this activity is to lead qualitative and quantitative research initiatives to capture the explicit and tacit needs of rural communities.

• Identifying gaps in existing standards
• New PARs based on the gaps
• Identification of Recommended Practices
• Workshops and Events
• Webinars
• Reports
• Collaboration initiatives
• Designing and building working prototypes that will be tested on field

We welcome new participants from large and small corporations, academia, industry, and government agencies that are interested in User-Centered Approach to Designing a User Interface for Rural Communities. Members will include but are not limited to:

• Semiconductor manufacturers
• Service providers
• Regulators
• OEMS
• ODMS
• Telcos
• Technology Providers

To learn more about the program and how to join the User-Centered Approach to Designing a User Interface for Rural Communities activity, please express your interest by sending an inquiry to the activity chair whose information can be found in the Contacts section.