The sheer penetration and availability of the Internet can pose some interesting challenges in the realm of design.

Imagine an information kiosk in a village somewhere near the small city of, say, Pakpattan (in the province of Punjab, Pakistan). Now, assume that someone who actually knew what he was doing designed and developed the kiosk and it is ‘live’ and updates itself using the Internet etc etc. And the kiosk provides information regarding agriculture. Brilliant. People just walk up, click on, say, pesticides, and see its application methods with regards to different crops. Or click on crops and see different methods of fertilizer applications, pesticide and water use etc. All good. But what if you were to design such a system?

You would write off English as the language of choice almost subconsciously. Then you would realize that almost everyone you have talked to who is the actual farmer, can not read nor write. So you scratch out languages from your list. Given these set of constraints, designing a user interface becomes the only thing that separates a good, working, helpful application from a ‘nice-try’. (And yes, user interface is almost always this important).

What would you do? Use images, of course. Again, not as simple as one would think. An image of a bunch of grass may represent ‘weed’ for your urbanized mind, but for the farmer, that is grass. What about other weeds? The narrow-leaf and the wide-leaf? What single image will speak to the farmer and say, ‘click/press me if you want information about weed’? (Yes, yes, images can talk like that. Picture and thousand words, remember?).

Microsoft is tackling this, as many others are. Designing user-interfaces that gets sold is what Microsoft does, really. During their research, they found (among many other things, I am sure ) that:

Another problem lies in the fact that different countries, different cultures and even people from different towns respond differently to iconic images. Anandan explained that the average image used in the U.S. for a home would look like two sides of a home and a slanted roof. However, someone looking for housekeeping work in India might see that icon and assume that it was a hut and not a nice home. In India, the icon for a home would have to represent a two-story dwelling, he said. (from ComputerWorld)

Had I not been so verbose, the following line would have sufficed to say what I just said above:

Design is for, and only for, the actual audience