Software designers in many parts of the world rely on Interactive Voice Response (IVR) and Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD) to create applications that work universally on basic mobile phones. In this work, we demonstrate our use of hierarchical visualizations like icicle charts to explore the usage data generated by IVR and USSD applications, helping designers understand user behavior and evaluate the efficacy of the applications’ different components. By adding interactive elements, a viewer could zoom down to to see details about users’ behavior from a certain screen, or filter users by different demographics.

When chronic illness, such as Lyme disease, is viewed through a disability lens, equitable access to public spaces becomes an important area for consideration. Yet chronic illness is often viewed solely through an individualistic, medical model lens. We contribute to this field of study in four consecutive steps using Lyme disease as a case study: (1) we highlight urban design and planning literature to make the case for its relevance to chronic illness; (2) we explore the place-related impacts of living with chronic illness through an analysis of interviews with fourteen individuals living with Lyme disease; (3) we derive a set of design guidelines from our literature review and interviews that serve to support populations living with chronic illness; and (4) we present an interactive mapping prototype that applies our design guidelines to support individuals living with chronic illness in experiencing and navigating public and outdoor spaces.

Interactive wildlife-tracking maps on public-facing websites and apps have become a popular way to share scientific data with the public as more conservationists and wildlife researchers deploy tracking devices on animals. Environmental organizations engage with the public for a variety of reasons: to raise awareness of environmental causes, build relationships with potential partners, and encourage people to take political and personal actions. However while there is a large body of work comparing different media strategies for environmental communication goals, the effectiveness of interactive data visualizations for these purposes remains unclear. This work examines the strengths and weaknesses of interactive wildlife-tracking maps for environmental communication. We interview conservationists about their aspirations for using these maps with their own data, and conduct a study gauging lay users’ reactions to different designs. Many conservationists aspire to create deep, immersive user engagements with these maps—letting users relate to data-driven stories about individual animals and freely explore the nuances of the tracking data. Our findings show potential for the most highly-motivated users to deeply engage with these data and stories, but more casually-interested audiences struggle with the maps’ complexities. However for casual audiences, wildlife tracking maps can still superficially but effectively showcase the organizations’ work to protect the species; perhaps inspiring hope for their future, attracting audiences to other communication channels to learn more, and adding to the organizations’ credibility. Following these insights, we present a set of design considerations for further development of similar wildlife-tracking map applications; emphasizing their needs for user onboarding, context for data interpretation, and integration with relatable media.

Wildlife conservancies across the globe are increasingly recognizing their need to support their surrounding communities to sustainably operate. Rapidly shifting environmental and sociopolitical climates increasingly stress existing resource and service provisions, forcing wildlife conservancies to co-manage with local communities shared resources like water, wildlife, soil, pollinators, and security. This work presents a case study in Laikipia, Kenya on Ol Pejeta Conservancy's use of text-based technologies to provide services and build relationships with the many widely-dispersed communities on its borders. Through technology deployments, staff interviews, and community focus groups, we investigate a potential role for basic mobile phone services, like SMS and USSD, to help conservancy personnel disseminate accurate and timely information, gather community feedback, address grievances, and improve accountability. Our findings show that communication with locals requires intense and ongoing effort from conservancy staff. Partially successful deployments of phone services provide a proof-of-concept for their utility in community relations but highlight particular design challenges for wildlife conservancies; having critical needs for broad inclusive engagement; clear, deliberate communication; and careful trust-building.

Agricultural market information (MI) services provide smallholder farmers with convenient access to price information and have demonstrated potential to improve their incomes. Some recent evaluations of MI systems, however, have shown disappointing results and brought forth many complicating factors. Cautious of the mixed literature, we investigate the potential effectiveness and likely limitations of an MI service for improving livelihoods of smallholder farmers in the context of Loop, a shared transport-to-market-service for farmers. We conducted interviews with 17 farmers and 3 commission agents in Buxar, Bihar (India). Consistent with "information scarcity" and "information asymmetry" theories, we report how many farmers in this area regularly use mobile phones to check prices for choosing markets and negotiating transactions. Participants reported increases in the numbers of traders and price stabilization since the arrival of mobile phones. However, we found many other diverse factors that often outweigh the importance of market prices and inhibit market access, including market capacity, time, unfamiliarity with new markets, personal relationships, attitudes towards risk, credit relationships, and physical danger. Finally, to probe which of these additional factors might be addressable using an MI service, we present exploratory findings from preliminary user-interface studies.