An Approach to User Interface Design with Two Indigenous Groups in Namibia

It has been widely reported that interactions with and expectations of technology differ across cultural contexts. Concepts such as ‘usability’ have shown to be context-dependent, thus user interfaces intuitive to one group of users appears counter-intuitive to the others. In an attempt to localise a user interface of a tablet based system aimed at preserving Indigenous Knowledge for rural Herero communities, we present findings from two sites in Namibia, complementing prior research. Participants who had little or no previous experience with technologies informed our endeavour of aligning local indigenous knowledge practices with digital object taxonomies. We present a method (picture card sorting) of discovering taxonomies that influence the users' interaction with a prototype system to preserve indigenous knowledge. Finally we describe the design implications, a new design approach based on findings and present preliminary evaluations in a collaboration village as well as design export results with another indigenous group.