Towards a more personalised user experience and better demographic data on the Digital Doorway public computer terminals
Kim Gush · 2008
The Digital Doorway project provides rugged multi-terminal computers, enabling users in underprivileged rural communities in South Africa to teach themselves basic ICT skills without the need of a teacher present. In addition, the terminals provide a mechanism for educational content delivery and community upliftment through various means. The paper highlights recent progress made towards answering the question: How can existing as well as new Digital Doorway infrastructure be used to increase the user's sense of ownership of the computer and improve demographic data collected on the Digital Doorways? The following topics are addressed: � Digital Doorway system architecture and software � Personalised and shared user spaces � The need for functionality enhancing interventions on the Digital Doorway � A mechanism for users to transfer files from the Digital Doorway to a personal device � The collection and analysis of quantitative user data and application usage statistics The current Digital Doorway configuration is a 3-terminal set-up with a client/fileserver PC and two diskless clients. A satellite downlink and GPRS backhaul provide a mechanism for content delivery and log file retrieval. A Bluetooth dongle and GUI application allow a user to save files from the Digital Doorway to a personal device. Users have the opportunity to create their own user accounts and enter personal information such as age, gender and home language. These data, together with statistics on application usage, are collected and transmitted to a central server. User desktops can be personalised using the built in webcam. This provides an incentive for users to create their own user logins, thus increasing the accuracy of the collected demographic data. Through the comparison of two hypothetical scenarios, it is proposed that an effective installation requires ongoing content updates and system maintenance. In addition, a sense of ownership of the equipment needs to be fostered among the community as a whole and among individual users. Results from the data collection process indicate a dominance of male users between the ages of ten and twenty-four years old. Despite the rural location of most sites, the language of choice for most users is English. The twenty most popular applications on the Digital Doorway are identified. It is possible to visualise the data collected at each site, establish which sites are well used and identify sites that are undergoing technical difficulties. Unsuccessful sites may require technical or social intervention, or even relocation. Improved network visualisation mechanisms will contribute to speedier fault identification and greater system uptime, in turn, providing a more meaningful ICT education tool.