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(This article first appeared in SIGCHI's "interactions" magazine, July/August 2001)
HCI people in the developed world have had success spreading the word about UCD as something that companies need to embrace for success of their products in the market place. If this "pitch" is valid, and we certainly believe it is, then maket forces alone should drive adoption of UCD practices.
What happens, though, when the context is not one of a developed consumer society, but one of a developing economy? How does UCD fit in not just with the "product development lifecycle," but also with national initiatives aimed at broad social development? Such programs, typically endorsed, sponsored or even mandated by government agencies, tend to have a top-down character that often leads them to operate in ways that conflict with the fundamental principals of UCD. As with consumer products, if technological development does not really meet the needs of the user, it will fail. UCD seems like a natural antidote to this tendency, but what are the dynamics of getting a non-market driven entity to adopt or promote UCD practice so that these principles can help guide national technological initiatives toward success?
This article provides a case study of one such effort in progress, based on a collaboration of government, business, and academic stakeholders. The context is South Africa, a nation whose economic potential can only be released if political enfranchisement for masses of people is backed up by economic and technological enfranchisement. Technological and economic development in South Africa may face obstacles beyond what most of us in HCI are familiar with. However, a group of dedicated HCI visionaries see a potential for familiar UCD principles to be a key element in addressing those problems, and possibly an antidote to the all too common failure paths of well-intended top down technology planning.
-- Susan Dray
South African society is undergoing a transformation shaped both by indigenous socio-economic forces and cultural practices and by the forces of globalization. In South Africa, as in many other countries, there exists a digital divide between the technological 'haves' and 'have nots'. For the 'haves', computer-based commerce and dynamic networked communication is not only possible but also an indispensable tool for every day business and personal activities. For the "have nots," the situation is obviously radically different. In South Africa, this group is especially diverse. In fact, the population on the fringes of information and communications technology (ICT), seems to grow culturally, economically and educationally more diverse. Users from these communities that have not yet been brought into the global technology revolution have vastly different expectations of technology. These expectations are colored by their frame of reference, educational level, cultural prejudices, career expectations, income, and many other variables that are very poorly understood by software developers, nor accommodated within current design practices in South Africa.
Because this population of potential users is so diverse, and because the needs are so great, human factors has a crucial role to play, not only in the design of computing products for diverse user groups, but also in our efforts to build a healthy Information and Communications Technology industry that can enrich people's economic, social, cultural, and political lives. Without proper understanding of the cultural variables involved, design of technology threatens to expand, rather than resolve, the divide between haves and have nots, something our society can not tolerate.
While the forces of globalization make it more urgent to resolve this problem so that South Africa can emerge as a full participant in technological development, globalization also tends to conflict with the goal of making technology accessible to the broader population. The blind acceptance of imported products, threatens to impose a typical "one size fits all" marketing strategy on South African users that will inevitably result in excluding various sectors of society from access to, and benefiting from ICT. As everywhere else in the world, ICT is both a product and an agent of change. When looking at the impact of globalization on development in South Africa in particular, it is clear that ICT can clash with cultural values that emphasize traditional community and plays an important role in hastening change towards more individualistic values. South African developers therefore must understand how these technologies (whether in the form of device, interface or the institution represented) might enhance or undermine this and other aspects of the indigenous cultural systems of South African society. Human Factors inevitably must address the need for sensitivity to indigenous realities and the design of technology. In fact, to any HCI practitioner it is obvious that UCD is the enabler needed to leverage modern information technology for South African society.
Unfortunately software and systems development in South Africa is still characterized by the application of engineering techniques to technical problems, with little, if any, attention to human factors. As elsewhere in the world, this results in poor application usability, poor user performance, low productivity levels, and users' dependence on support and training. Where the notion of "UCD" has reached the IT community at all, it is still fraught with all the common misconceptions: "too expensive, irrelevant, unnecessary" The predominant attitude in South African mainstream IT is to regard HCI, UCD and usability as "fringe" disciplines and therefore "nice to have". This attitude is exacerbated by the fact that there are only a handful of practitioners and they have no "official" standing, no matter how professional or well qualified they may be. The problem is clearly one of awareness - developers simply "don't know what they don't know" and they will either fail to recognize the failure of an application, or attribute problems to technical difficulties or users' lack of training.
Fortunately, there are two stakeholders that seem to show some promise of contributing to a change in this state of affairs, and make it more likely that technological development may be oriented to the needs of particular communities. These are the South African Government and the budding HCI community.
The South African government has recognized that research and development, both applied and basic, in the natural sciences and in the social sciences, are crucial to social and economic development, innovation and national competitiveness. Government has several legitimate missions in regard to development that make it potentially a supporter of HCI. These include the need to advance democratization by breaking down the gulf between technological haves and have nots, thereby promoting the development of a just and stable society. Second, as an important stakeholder in the development of national resources, the government must thus ensure that state funds are applied effectively when services are contracted from the private sector. This can mean holding suppliers accountable for ensuring that their technology solutions are truly usable by their target populations. Finally, as promoter of the overall development of South African industry and economy, the government also has an interest in reducing dependence on foreign sources and encouraging the development of indigenous industry to meet indigenous needs
Having neither the expertise nor the resources, the government is dependent on industry and academia to execute initiatives that it may promote in these areas. As is typical with most top-down initiatives, this often creates unwieldy bureaucracies and complex structures that make it very difficult for small organizations and individual specialists to contribute. It also increases the risk that design will be driven in a top down way rather than in a user-centered manner, unless government recognizes the need for UCD and promotes UCD as part of the answer.
Another factor makes the government a potentially powerful sponsor of UCD. Because of the government's strong influence on economic and industrial development, "fringe" initiatives often gain high-profile status overnight when there is some association with, or an official "endorsement" by government. This creates the possibility for demonstration projects that will be highly visible on the national level. This phenomenon will be "exploited" in our solution discussed towards the end of this article.
A small number of educators are introducing HCI into computer science curricula, and practitioners are working with application developers to integrate UCD into the overall product development life cycle. In addition, the local HCI special interest group (CHI-SA, the South African ACM SIGCHI Chapter) is actively working with several stakeholders, including academics and non-government organizations (NGOs) to raise awareness of the impact of UCD in usability and overall organizational performance. HCI practitioners are now beginning to pay special attention to the processes of enculturation, acculturation and cultural identities in the localization of software. They also have recognized the need to encourage developers to understand the role of the many cultural factors at work in the design of computing products, as well as the issues involved in inter- and multicultural software design and internationalization, and how they impact the bottom line for organizations. In a very few organizations, some progress has been made towards institutionalizing UCD.
These efforts are certainly praiseworthy but the awareness gap is still large, the technology accessibility gulf seems to be widening, and poor usability is very much in evidence in most sectors. There is still a tremendous scarcity of qualified practitioners and educators, which is related to a lack of awareness and implementation at industry level, and an isolation and fragmentation between academia, industry, private R&D and government.
A large part of the challenge lies in the fact that, despite the recent chartering of CHI-SA, South Africa does not have a well-established HCI community yet - there are simply not enough people active in HCI to ensure that the message is spread widely enough to reach a critical mass of lecturers, students and developers. Even the few who have committed themselves to the field experience many practical difficulties. Several factors like economy, language, infrastructure, and sheer ignorance among potential sponsors or employers prevent them from experiencing the realities of the field at first hand or to learn from their counterparts in the international community. The handful of HCI practitioners in South Africa are painfully aware that the research that will lead to the user interfaces for the computing devices of tomorrow is happening now at universities and corporate research labs all over the world - almost everywhere else except in South Africa.
Clearly neither technology nor social constructs alone can provide the answers to these challenges. By definition, the issues are multidisciplinary and will therefore require multidisciplinary approaches to the design of software for the masses.
It is clear that, in light of the needs and the limited resources, something rather dramatic needs to be done to mobilize all available resources to reduce the ignorance in this country. This is the challenge that CHI-SA and its partners in government, industry, government and NGOs hope to address in a bold venture that will create the critical mass (in all possible terms: ideologically, economically, technologically, educationally or politically) necessary to help us cross the chasm and develop innovative ways to grow sustainable indigenous developments through identification, development and exploitation of local HCI skills and resources. This venture is called an "Indigenous HCI Cluster", a term used to describe a virtual organization which is a collection of real and virtual resources, concepts, skills and organizations with the mission of identifying and promoting synergies and key projects that will leverage HCI knowledge and UCD practices into the South African ICT context.
The concept of an Indigenous HCI Cluster has its origin in the similarly named "Indigenous ICT Clusters" which resulted from a number of high-level projects launched by the Department of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology (DACST) and the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI), in collaboration with advisors from industry and academia. Notable among these initiatives is the Technology Foresight Exercise, which investigated the potential technological trends and trajectories of significance to the social and economic development of South Africa, and as such served to inform R&D investments by the public and private sectors in this country. However, apart from the specific technological insights from Foresight, the process of conducting such an exercise had in itself paid dividends in other countries by enhancing certain characteristics among the groups who participated. In the South African Government's White paper on Science and Technology (see http://www.gov.za/whitepaper/1997/sc&tecwp.htm) these were referred to as the six C's of research foresight:
Communication bringing together people in a novel forum so that they can interact
Concentration on the longer term, so that participants can look further into the future than they might otherwise
Co-ordination so that people not accustomed to working together can form productive R&D partnerships
Consensus so that a clear picture of likely future scenarios is generated
Comprehension so that those involved gain an understanding of changes that are happening in their businesses or professions, at a global level, and attempt to exert some control over these events
Commitment so that people participate fully and are able and willing to implement changes in the light of the foresight exercise.
Recommendations and implementation plans that have emerged from Foresight have centered on "ICT Industrial Clusters". These have mostly been modeled on experiences with successful clusters developed in the first world, and "satellite" clusters developed in other developing countries like India and Sudan. Such satellite clusters promote ICT capacity and capability, and merit further development. However, they are usually very dependent on first world markets and technologies, and tend to play a secondary role to first world clusters. Since they are not intended to address the needs of the disadvantaged, they tend to involve only the developed elites in the developing world, and have little if any impact on the vast majority of the population in these countries.
This is where the Indigenous ICT Clusters come in - they are intended to focus on how first world ICTs might be customized, or new ICTs might be locally developed to satisfy specifically the needs of the poor, disadvantaged groups in remote and rural areas. It is anticipated that some of the resultant ICT applications and services will not only satisfy the needs of our disadvantaged communities, but might also find significant markets in the first world. Hence, by addressing our own burning needs, it is likely that in the medium term, we might also create areas of high growth and foreign revenue generation from these indigenous ICT Clusters.
One of the most promising areas for such local ICT development, is theIndigenous HCI Cluster which would include, and initially emphasize, cultural diversity in ICT, for example in the form of speech technology for African languages. The key objectives of this HCI Cluster would be the:
The cluster could become the virtual headquarters of HCI resources and skills for the IT industry, offering specialized skills such as ethnographic analyses, multicultural design, and many more. As an indigenous cluster, it could also stimulate investment through tax incentives and access to scare resources.
It is obvious that the success of this model depends on all stakeholders accepting the bi-directional dynamics of the cluster: being essentially a top-down initiative, the cluster provides the vital framework within which the bottom-up processes of domain-specific principles and resources (like User-Centered Design) must be deployed. At this early stage it seems to be the most practical way to prevent fragmentation of our scarce resources - the fledgling HCI community simply cannot sustain the development of independent HCI organizations and uncoordinated resources. The cluster provides such a strong framework for the optimization and consolidation of our scarce usability resources that we expect that this will be compelling enough to become accepted as an operating model for business, government and academia.
Although CHI-SA plays a key role in the direction and activities of the cluster, it should not be mistaken for simply a SIG on steroids. Through its alliance with computer societies and related initiatives like UsabilityNet (www.usabilitynet.org), it is intended to combine the best attributes of private sector flexibility, initiative and entrepreneurism, with tertiary sector research and the needs and enthusiasm of the individual practitioner (an often repeated dream!)
Hence thought leadership on HCI theory and practice would be provided by the HCI community, universities and other research organizations like the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) and the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), via a high interaction mechanism, but with no direct control. This would be implemented by:
The major components of the cluster and their relationships are illustrated in the following diagram:
The diagram indicates that the primary stakeholders are those who overlap the cluster's own infrastructure (CHI-SA, the cluster's own contributors, the HCI community, the IT industry, its own related societies, and the user community). All other stakeholders, contributors and suppliers lie outside the cluster's own infrastructure. All supporting functions like policy, funding and public relations are also located outside the cluster.
The cluster will have a staff of approximately 40 people, of which about two thirds will be made up of seconded researchers, students and other temporary project members. We expect to accommodate an average of 20 post-graduate student interns per year. The remainder of the members will be full-time HCI specialists, project managers, developers and two administrators. The cluster will be managed by a young energetic, non-bureaucratic champion with a lot of energy and drive, idealism and excellent communication skills. The total operating cost of the cluster is estimated at $200,000 for the first year.
The intent is that real HCI work will be performed inside the cluster, but most of the outputs will be ploughed back straight into the community (for example through "Multi-purpose Community Centers", or MPCCs), into both the IT and the HCI community in the form of new job opportunities and best practice, or into tertiary education in the form of industry experience. Perhaps more important, a portion of the outputs will be spun off in the form of new small and medium enterprises (SMEs) where HCI and usability best practice will almost automatically form part of their core operations.
Although key sponsors and partners have yet to be confirmed, a number of critical projects have already been identified:
It can clearly be seen that these initiatives are interdependent and potentially mutually reinforcing, and this emphasizes the need to coordinate and consolidate a large number of resources.
Developing local or national indigenous HCI Clusters will consolidate all resources needed to help ensure the support of the objectives of all stakeholders involved in economic growth and democratization of technology, and that user-centered design in South Africa will include a cultural dimension. If not, we will remain at the receiving end of foreign computing developments. Software will never reflect and acknowledge our economic, political, and cultural diversity, nor will it accommodate the true needs of our upcoming generations. We need structures like the HCI Cluster to ensure the development of interfaces for the Rainbow Nation!
Jacques Hugo is the principal of Usability Sciences Consulting in Pretoria, South Africa, and the Chair of CHI-SA, the South African ACM SIGCHI Chapter. (jacques@usabilitysa.co.za)
Dr Bob Day is the Executive Director of Information and Communications Technology at the University of South Africa in Pretoria. (bday@unisa.ac.za)