While mobile phones have found broad application in bringing health, financial, and other services to the developing world, usability remains a major hurdle for novice and low-literacy populations. In this article, we take two steps to evaluate and improve the usability of mobile interfaces for such users. First, we offer an ethnographic study of the usability barriers facing 90 low-literacy subjects in India, Kenya, the Philippines, and South Africa. Then, via two studies involving over 70 subjects in India, we quantitatively compare the usability of different points in the mobile design space. In addition to text interfaces such as electronic forms, SMS, and USSD, we consider three text-free interfaces: a spoken dialog system, a graphical interface, and a live operator. Our results confirm that textual interfaces are unusable by first-time low-literacy users, and error prone for literate but novice users. In the context of healthcare, we find that a live operator is up to ten times more accurate than text-based interfaces, and can also be cost effective in countries such as India. In the context of mobile banking, we find that task completion is highest with a graphical interface, but those who understand the spoken dialog system can use it more quickly due to their comfort and familiarity with speech. We synthesize our findings into a set of design recommendations.

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We describe work toward the goal of a user interface (UI) designed such that even novice, illiterate users require absolutely no intervention from anyone at all to use. Our text-free UI is based on many hours of ethnographic design conducted in collaboration with a community of illiterate domestic laborers in three Bangalore slums. An ethnographic design process was used to understand what kind of application subjects would be interested in, how they respond to computing technology, and how they react to specific UI elements. We built two applications using these principles, one for job search for domestic laborers and another for a generic map that could be used for navigating a city. The resulting designs are based on key lessons that we gained through the design process. This article describes the design process, the design principles, which evolved out of the process, the final application designs, and results from initial user testing. Our results confirm previous work that emphasizes the need for semiabstracted graphics and voice feedback, but we additionally find that some aspects of design for illiterate users that have been previously overlooked (such as a consistent help feature). Results also show that the text-free designs are strongly preferred over standard text-based interfaces by the communities which we address and that they are potentially able to bring even complex computer functions within the reach of users who are unable to read. (c) 2007 by The Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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Due to the increasing penetration of mobile phones even in poor communities, mobile-phone-enabled banking (m-banking) services are being increasingly targeted at the "unbanked" to bring formal financial services to the poor. Research in understanding actual usage and adoption by this target population, though, is sparse. There appear to be a number of issues which prevent low-income, low-literate populations from meaningfully adopting and using existing m-banking services. This paper examines variations across countries in adoption and usage of existing m-banking services by low-literate, low-income individuals and possible factors responsible for the same. It is observed that variations are along several parameters: household type, services adopted, pace of uptake, frequency of usage, and ease of use. Each of these observations is followed by a set of explanatory factors that mediate adoption and usage.