Focus Groups in Rural User Studies

The OpenPhone system is a health information system that is developed to cater for the information needs of caregivers who are caring for HIV/AIDS infected children in Botswana, southern Africa. The system is accessible via an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system in the local language of Setswana, through a normal telephone. The development of the system deploys usability engineering and participatory design methodologies in the ambition to make the system usable and useful to the target user population. The paper presents the first step in the development of a product within the paradigm of usability engineering and participatory design. This step is concerned with acquiring user requirements, users' present ways of doing things, and the tasks that they would like to use the system for, in the milieu of the fact that establishing user requirements is well recognized as a critical step in the development of useful and usable systems [1]. This paper advocates the method of focus groups as a primary means of soliciting those user requirements and other user information particularly for the specified user population.