Culture and Usability: ATMs and the Mumbai Story

'This is not about ease of use. We are back to researching cultural constraints,' said Antonella De Angeli. 'And it's not cosmetic changes – you have to go back and do a new task analysis.'

Speaking at the 2nd HCI and Culture Workshop at the University of Greenwich last month, De Angeli described work with Lynne Coventry and Graham Johnson of NCR on introducing ATMs into Mumbai and made some general comments on method.

She showed that, whereas take-up of ATMs in Britain was affected primarily by age, in Mumbai the factor of class also impacted on whether a person was likely to get their money from a hole in the wall. Foreign and private banks were the preserve of the middle to upper classes and it was mainly these banks that were introducing the technology.

She was at pains to make the point that findings from Mumbai could not be generalised, even within India, as the city was atypical in a number of ways.

She illustrated this point by talking about how people handled their money in this Indian city. Most stored enough to tide them over for up to a month within their homes and were prepared to lend this to friends and family, overcoming any need for out of hours banking.

There was resignation to queuing for up to an hour within the bank.

Perhaps most interestingly, those with ATM cards would share them in small groups of friends. It would be made available to anyone who needed it and so the PIN would be widely known – raising a new set of security issues.

Other local factors included the lack of a Hindi word for 'ATM' and for 'withdrawal', and generally poor translation, meaning that the Hindi versions of the screens were not much used. Since the classes that ATMs appealed to tended to be proficient in English, this was no barrier, but it could begin to be if the services took off more broadly.

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