A Framework for Community-Oriented Mobile Interaction Design in Emerging Regions

The interaction design of mobile applications for a specific community of users, requires a deep knowledge of that community in order to establish appropriate usability requirements and tune the subsequent development activities. This is especially true when the target community is situated in one of the developing countries. There, mobile devices are increasingly playing the role that personal computers play in 'developed' countries, in spite of quite different cultural, social and technological constraints. In this paper we propose a 'community-centered' design approach, where different aspects of a community are used to formulate usability goals and are taken into account throughout the design, prototyping and testing phases, so as to ensure the actual application deployment by users of that community. The case study of a project carried out with a community of farmers in Sri Lanka is used to illustrate the approach.