Global/Local Usability: Locally Contextualized Usability in the Global South

Digital technology has permeated nearly every inhabited corner of the globe, from the metropolitan global information hubs in the USA or Europe, where everything from the parking ticket to the vacuum cleaner seems increasingly digital and networked, to the most remote African or Indian village, where the mobile phone and network are proliferating at much talked-about speeds. Meanwhile, the swelling middle classes of developing urban areas in low-income countries race to catch or surpass their high-income country counterparts in their technological capacity and enthusiasm. Digital technology is now a truly global phenomenon. With this spread of technology comes the growing importance and necessity that it be easy to use, especially where its users are neophytes. This basic fact was thankfully recognized several decades ago, resulting in the field of usability and humancomputer interaction, and today a vast canon of academic literature, field guides, best practices, and case studies of success and failure has been assembled and refined around the topic of usability. The ubiquity of digital technology would seem to foretell of the coming ubiquity of those same maxims and mores of usability. But this would be a mistake. This chapter argues that for true usability to prevail, usability methods, techniques, and institutions must be localized and contextualized. While true for any region, we feel that this principle is most important in the world’s poorest countries, which we will refer to here collectively as ‘The Global South’. This term, ‘Global South’, like any other which entails dividing the world into discrete categories, comes with its own baggage. But in any case this chapter does not hinge upon any concrete geographic delineation. Broadly, we suggest that our analysis is most salient for countries listed as lowor lower-middle income in the World Bank’s country classification, though we acknowledge that there will be exceptions.