Text-Free Job Search by Microsoft Research India and Babajob

By Indrani Medhi (MSRIndia), Shibili R (MSRIndia), Kentaro Toyoma (MSRIndia) and Sean Blagsvedt (babajob.com)

About MSRIndia's Text-Free work

For over a billion people on the planet, the power of computing is largely out of reach due to illiteracy. How can we expand the impact of technology to those who cannot read? Text-Free User Interfaces are design guidelines for computer-human interfaces that would allow any first-time, non-literate person, on first contact with a PC, to immediately realize useful interaction with minimal or no assistance. We arrived at the following design principles through an ethnographic design process involving over 300 hours and 250 people from urban slums in Bangalore, India: extensive use of hand-drawn, semi-abstracted cartoons with voice annotation, aggressive mouse-over functionality, a consistent help feature, and looping full-context video dramatizing the purpose and mechanism of the application. We have applied these principles to three applications – job-search for the informal labor market, health-information dissemination, and an electronic map. Rigorous user evaluations show that the text-free designs are strongly preferred over standard text-based interfaces and that first-time, non-literate users are, in fact, able to navigate through text-free UIs meaningfully. Recently, we have also begun exploring design principles for mobile phones, as well as to understand characteristics of the cognitive styles of those with little formal education.  (For more on MSRIndia;s text-free work, please visit:  http://research.microsoft.com/~indranim/

Text-Free Job Search with Babajob

We have applied the Text-Free UI design principles to an online job-search site for the informal labor market- http://www.babajob.com - which also leverages online social networking. Today in India, such workers find employment entirely through word of mouth, with almost no formal or organized means of identifying potential employers. The goal of the project is to successfully establish a computer-based system to help match non-literate, low-income workers with potential middle-class employers, in Bangalore, India. This application allows prospective employers to post precise job descriptions through text-based forms and the non-literate, low-income job seekers to search for best-paying jobs through dynamic webpages displayed in Text-Free UI form.

Click here to see the demo

Note: Click here to see instructions on how to enable the Text-to-Speech features of this demo.