Design Metaphor to Improve Usability of User Interface for Paddy Farmers in Malaysia

Metaphor is a representation of object and situation that have meaning and comparable to real thing to convey the message to people. The purpose of using metaphor is to facilitate in making communication more direct and effective for particular user communities. This study reveals design metaphor issues for paddy farmer population in agriculture domain in Malaysia. The work is motivated by the ICT-Based Agriculture Flagship Blueprint of the Malaysia Government, an initiative to equips agriculture stakeholders in Malaysia including farmers with ICT knowledge on multiple platforms e.g. kiosk, personal computer or mobile device. The metaphors design is deemed to have a huge potential to improve user interface usability of agriculture applications for paddy farmers in Malaysia.