Portfolio: Interactive Books

Afghan Women's Health Book

Interaction Designer: Ellen Brodsky

The Challenge

We needed to present material about birth control, sexually transmitted diseases, and women's health, along with other health topics, in a highly respectful way to women in a Muslim culture. We also could not offend any men who happened to read the book.
Many of the women in our target audience were illiterate and had never before used any kind of technology. In some cases, they had not even used a pen for writing. Iconography was a huge challenge, as many of the conventions we take for granted in the United States simply didn't make any sense for Afghan women.

The Result

We consulted closely with a female MD who had worked extensively with rural people and refugees both in Afghanistan and in Pakistan. This doctor helped us find acceptable ways to discuss topics that are very sensitive for Muslims. For example, for the topic of birth control, we could not mention birth control or family planning at all. Instead we used the analogy of well-spaced vs. crowded carrots to represent the difference in children's health when born with and without spacing of their births. Both men and women in the Afghan culture could accept the idea that birth spacing would produce healthier children. Then it was fine to discreetly talk about specific methods to achieve that goal.

The LeapFrog platform's stylus was very challenging for people who had never used a pen, so we developed a multimedia How to Use This Book page, reassuring users that they did not have to be able to read to use the book and showing them visually how to hold and use the stylus.

To help engage illiterate women, and to promote literacy, many pages used an interactive story-circle technique. Touching one image would play a part of the story, then direct the user to touch another image through the audio, thereby leading the user through that page's story without requiring any reading ability.

We conducted extensive user tests with recent refugees from Afghanistan to validate our design.