I asked Apala about designing for low-income, low-literacy audiences.

Apala also talks about cultural differences between India and China, and between India and 'the West', about the dangers of being overly-polite, about why foreign insurance companies may not do well in India, and about the use of rasas for measuring emotion.

You can read more about Apala on the Human Factors International website (www.humanfactors.com/about/Apala.asp).

See Wikipedia's entry on Rasas (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rasa_%28art%29).

(I referred to Paul Sherman's presentations at User Friendly 2006 in China - Paul's put them online, and there are pointers on his blog - www.usabilityblog.com/blog/archives/2006/11/my_user_friendl.php).

This episode is 20 minutes 43 seconds in duration. File size is 11.8MB.

I asked Alan Cooper (over a rather echoing connection) why he is outraged by bad software, and how he developed the concept of 'personas'.

I was interested to hear the 'father of Visual Basic' say 'What I need is a computer that doesn't make me feel bad and a cellphone that doesn't make me feel stupid'.

Alan's company is Cooper Consulting (www.cooper.com)

The two books of his that I mentioned are:

The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity
(www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0672326140/informdesign)

About Face 2.0: The Essentials of Interaction Design
(www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0764526413/informdesign)

This episode is 19 minutes 44 seconds in duration. File size is 11.3MB.