Continue the Conversation: Design for Africa

[kevin_s2f]

At JavaOne, Nokia Sr. UI Designer JD Moore discusses key design techniques for services in Africa in his presentation Regional and Cultural Accessibility for the Java™ Platform, Micro Edition (Java ME Platform): Africa. He continues the conversation here.

[JDMoore]

Thank you very much to all of you who attended our presentation at JavaOne. We enjoyed continuing the conversation with you directly after, and appreciated your interesting thoughts and questions.

Here are a few, in no particular order, that I’d like to address online here. If you have any more questions, please post and we'll answer!

Q: How can groups or people, working on similar 'emerging market' projects, engage companies such as Nokia?
A: I recommend Forum Nokia as a starting point (especially for JME-related projects). My co-presenter, Dan Orwa, became engaged through his University and experience in the field. Meeting people in person, sharing ideas, and advertising your projects at workshops or conferences such as JavaOne should also lead to engagement. If you have something interesting in mind, please let us know!

Q: How will you conduct usability studies with your mobile, interactive FM radio application in Africa?
A: We think the best way to do this will be to collaborate with community groups such as a Universities and community radio stations. A usability study in an emerging market will most likely be more successful if you have local people helping you out. The prototype we presented at JavaOne was based in part on previous usability studies, but the next phase is to test with "real users". We recommend doing this as early as you can--especially when doing R&D for markets you're not 100% familiar with. You will likely have to adapt your methodology, but the general approach to usability should suffice. Ask us for more details if you're interested.

Q: Is it really cheaper to use the mobile Internet than SMS for e.g. localization updates of your UI?
A: Yes, it certainly can be. However, there's no guarantee! We have used Kenya's most successful operator, Safaricom, as an example. Truthfully, it's not that expensive to use the mobile web in many parts of Africa any longer. When broken down to cost-per-kilobyte, SMS (texting) is actually often more expensive! Please remember that we use a "Fallback Mechanism" though and make sure to leave the user in control of expenditure.

[orwa]

Hi all,
I join JD in thanking all of you who attended our presentation at JavaOne. The issues raised there and here in the forum are of great importance and will go along way in improving your understanding and appreciation of Africa. We at the University of Nairobi Kenya are happy to work with Nokia and with any of you who would like to know more about Africa are more than welcome to engage us and we will be more than happy to assist wherever possible.
At the university of Nairobi, school of computing and informatics, we have students who are proficent in Java and have developed applications some of which appeared on our presentation. We can assist with conducting studies. Get in touch for more.

Dan Orwa

[smabres]

I enjoyed your presentation very much and I am waiting eagerly to see the code to use SMSort as an alternative for GPRS

[herenyi]

Hi All,

I'm Gergely Herenyi, the developer of the Interactive FM Radio Demo MIDlet presented at JavaOne. Sorry for the delays to publish the application and the code, but it takes time to go through the process, but I'm pretty sure the demo applications and the source code will be available within a couple of weeks. Check back regularly!

Meanwhile I'm more than happy to answer any development related questions about the demo application.
Cheers,
Gergo