Technology adoption by 'emergent' users

Abstract

Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) have a role to play in human development. However, in order to be effective, they have to be adopted and used by their potential users. While there is an extensive literature on user modelling, there has been very little effort to model emergent users -those who are less educated, economically disadvantaged, geographically dispersed, and culturally heterogeneous. These users have not been adequately addressed by the progress in ICT until recently. In order to design successful ICT artefacts for the emergent users, one needs to know how the users adopt them and progress in their usage. Based on contextual interviews, we propose a two-dimensional model of technology adoption. One dimension characterises the types of users on the basis of the factors affecting their predisposition towards technology adoption, such as culture, capabilities and attitudes. Along the other dimension, we map the progress of each user type in skilful usage of a given ICT artefact over time. We also identify the triggers and barriers encountered during this progress.

Revisiting “Hole in the Wall” Computing

“…One obvious difference between the context of the hole-in-thewall deployment and that of our installation is the change in availability of external information sources. It is generally accepted that many of the emergent users who live in and around the areas in which we have been working are beginning to get access to sophisticated devices and services [11,16], which could now include mobile voice recognition services such as Google's assistant. While this is a potentially valuable source of information for such users, issues still remain around data costs and availability, as well as language and dialect challenges.…”

“…While we are of course aware that many emergent users are now beginning to get their hands on more sophisticated devices and services that could potentially give access to mobile voice recognition [11,16], we argue that the current research is valuable as a probe for more smart-speaker-like interactions. Given the challenges faced by users in these environments, the likelihood of such a technology being integrated into single emergent-user homes in the not-so-distant future is very low.…”

“…There has also been a large body of research dedicated to spoken language systems for "emergent" users. Emergent users, as described by Devanuj and Joshi [11], are the hundreds of millions of people, typically those living in developing regions of the world, often resource-constrained and economically disadvantaged, who are just beginning to gain access to the latest mobile devices. Speech, as both an input and output modality, has long been seen to be important in these contexts (e.g., [18,38,41]) due to the high rates of illiteracy that are common in emergent user communities.…”

Modeling Less-Literate User’s Choices of Smartphone Authentication Modes

“…At the same time, a large population within India is less-literate [1,4,5] and have technology adoption challenges. We also observe rapid adoption of smartphones in the country by less-literate users [2] with no prior familiarity with computers and Internet ecosystem. Digitization, for example of services like Banking, DigiDhan [6], could leave the user vulnerable to a variety of cyber-security attacks.…”

“…The theoretical security measures available against such attacks are lowered by user behavior, which stems from poor Usability [3]. The available digital identity authorization modes in smartphones are subject to adoption by emergent users [2] based on various aspects of usability. In this study, we are trying to understand the influence of "Context of Use" on the adoption of authentication mechanisms.…”