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A fair amount of literature has been published concerning the gaps between HCI and software engineering. However, most of it tends to look at the effects of these gaps rather than their causes. We argue that the use of autoethnographic methods would help us in identifying the root causes of these gaps and can bring us closer to finding potential solutions. In this paper, we focus on issues associated with effort estimation for HCI activities in three projects in three typical engagement models for outsourced software development projects in a mainstream IT company in India, namely Fixed Price model, Mixed model, and Time & Material model. We found that the HCI practitioner needs to negotiate her position with several members of the team, both within the vendor and client organisations. At times, a foot-in-the-door project turns out to be a foot-in-the-mouth project. At other times, it leads to inefficiencies and imbalance of work load. The autoethnographic approach led to reflexive thinking by the HCI practitioner, helping her to develop a deeper understanding of all aspects of a problem, and bringing her closer to potential solutions in some cases. The paper also brings to light several aspects of autoethnography as a method, which can influence effort estimation of HCI activities for future projects.

With variety of interaction technologies like speech, pen, touch, hand or body gestures, eye gaze, etc., being now available for users, it is a challenge to design optimal and effective multimodal combinations for specific tasks. For designing that, it is important to understand how these modalities can be combined and used in a coordinated manner. We performed an experimental evaluation of combinations of different multimodal inputs, such as keyboard, speech and touch with pen etc, in an attempt to investigate, which combinations are efficient for diverse needs of the users. In our study, multimodal combination of three modalities was found to be more effective in terms of performance, accuracy and user experience than that of two modalities. Further, we also inferred the roles that each of the modalities play in a multimodal combination to achieve the usability goals.

Previous research has shown that low-literate users have difficulty using hierarchical information architectures and that a list design showing all items at once on a PC screen works best for search tasks. However, the limited screen space on phones makes it impossible to show more than a few items at once on a single screen. Does a hierarchical UI work better on a phone? In this study, we compared the performance of non-literate users from Bangalore, India, on a search task using a hierarchical UI (four levels deep) and a multi-page list that had forty items across seven pages of a touch-screen phone. Our results show that participants using the multi-page list perform better both in terms of time taken and percent correct even when the list UI design requires them to browse through multiple pages of items on the phone.

Do teams achieve important usability goals most of the time? Further, is goal achievement uniform or are practitioners more mindful of some goals than others? This paper presents an empirical study on usability goal achievement in industry projects. We used Usability Goal setting Tool (UGT), a recommender system that helps teams set, prioritize, and evaluate usability goals. The practitioner creates profiles for the product and its users. Based on these inputs, UGT helps the practitioner break down high-level usability goals into more specific goal parameters and provides recommendations, examples, and guidelines to assign weights to these parameters. UGT suggests strategies to evaluate goal parameters after the design is ready and assign them scores. UGT was used to collect data from 65 projects in the Indian software industry in which participants assigned weights and scores to the goal parameters. The 30 goal parameters suggested by UGT were found to be internally reliable, and having acceptable granularity and coverage. It was observed that goal parameter weights and scores correlated, but only moderately. Another interesting observation was that more than a third of the important goal parameters did not score well. We identify eight goal parameters that are typically high-weighted but have poor weight-score correlations. We call these "latent but important" goal parameters. Design teams will do well to pay closer attention to these goal parameters during projects.

We describe a qualitative user study that we conducted with 64 people living with HIV/AIDS (PLHA) in India recruited from private sector clinics. Our aim was to investigate information gaps, problems, and opportunities for design of relevant technology solutions to support HIV treatment. Our methodology included clinic visits, observations, discussion with doctors and counsellors, contextual interviews with PLHA, diary studies, technology tryouts, and home visits. Analysis identified user statements, observations, breakdowns, insights, and design ideas. We consolidated our findings across users with an affinity. We found that despite several efforts, PLHA have limited access to authentic information. Some know facts and procedures, but lack conceptual understanding of HIV. Challenges include low education, no access to technology, lack of socialisation, less time with doctors and counsellors, high power-distance between PLHA and doctors and counsellors, and information overload. Information solutions based on mobile phones can lead to better communication and improve treatment adherence and effectiveness if they are based on the following: repetition, visualisation, organisation, localisation, and personalisation of information, improved socialisation, and complementing current efforts in clinics.

The rapid increase in mobile penetration has cut through the literacy barriers even in the developing countries. It has paved a way for technological interventions in healthcare domain, using the mobile platform such as Interactive Voice Response Systems (IVRS). Over the past few years, IVRS have been looked upon as an intervention in frequent and non-frequent but time-critical health support systems for chronic diseases. We present an IVRS-based solution for a low-resource setting, to ameliorate the problems of People living with HIV/AIDS (PLHA). We discuss the strategy to deal with frequently and non-frequently used menus. We describe a style of interface added especially to meet the problem of selection of multiple and overlapping options. We highlight the use of flat messages (like health tips) and IRV-based quiz to provide information and shape users' understanding of the disease. We describe and discuss comparative study of usability evaluations of our system conducted with low literate rural users (independent of their HIV/AIDS status) in two villages of Maharashtra (India) in Marathi, the local language. Training provided to the users overcomes the problem of inability of abstract thinking in low literate users.

Several activities related to human-computer interaction (HCI) design are described in literature. However, it is not clear whether each HCI activity is equally important. We propose a multi-disciplinary framework to organise HCI work in phases, activities, methods, roles, and deliverables. Using regression analyses on data from 50 industry projects, we derive weights for the HCI activities in proportion to the impact they make on usability, and compare these with the recommended and assigned weights. The scores of 4 HCI activities (user studies, user interface design, usability evaluation of the user interface, and development support) have the most impact on the Usability Goals Achievement Metric (UGAM) and account for 58% of variation in it.

Social networking websites are being regularly used by individuals, groups, friends, colleagues etc. where they share information, communicate with each other by means of using websites like facebook, orkut, twitter, my space & many more.

This SIG will facilitate a debate concerning how best to support the development of indigenous HCI in developing countries, both as part of education and training systems and within industrial practice.

In this paper we investigate the problems and potential solutions to the effective establishment of HCI and usability in India and China. Our discussion is motivated by five years of collaboration with relevant bodies in both countries through EU-funded projects encouraging the development of a usability culture in academic and industrial sectors. In order to contribute to socially-responsible interaction in these countries the 'institutionalization' of HCI is necessary. For us, this involves three elements: firstly an appropriation of HCI concepts and methods to suit the local country / culture, secondly the forming of a national organization around the reshaped discipline that can actively promote HCI in industry and academia and establish links with local national organizations, and thirdly the roll-out of effective usability practice in industry. Some efforts made in this regard are briefly outlined.