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Cross-cultural user-interface designers should account for dimensions of cultures, e.g., the cultural anthropologist Hofstede's five dimensions when they conside potential design strategies. Recent publications suggest other deep cultural influences on the way people think, act, and feel, which suggest there may be cultural biases in traditional industry usability precepts.

KEYWORDSIn this paper, we describe the design process, results, and general observations obtained in designing a user interface for managing community-based micro-finance institutions in rural India. The primary users studied were semi-literate village women.We discuss our contextual study observations and conclude by presenting a grounded design approach that best leverages the existing learning patterns of the users.

In this paper we describe the design process, results and observations obtained in designing a user interface for managing community-based financial institutions in rural India. The primary users are semi-literate village women from local communities. We present detailed observations from our field visits and the resulting evolution in our design vision. We describe a successful design artifact that is the result of this process, and list several important features that contributed to its success. We conclude with the current state of our work and our plans for the future.