Designing mobile interfaces for novice and low-literacy users

Abstract

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.

Kusheh, na minem Fatu, en mi na koko farmer Hello, I am Fatu and I am a cocoa farmer : a Digital Farmer Field School for training in cocoa production and certification in Sierra Leone

“…This model sought to forestall 'blaming' less literate and novice users and to maintain a responsible innovation focus on usability as a task for which the developers and designers of the interface were accountable. This way of working aligns also with authors such as Medhi et al (2011) and Steyn et al…”

KrishiPustak

“…We drew inspiration from guidelines for 'Text-Free UIs' [26,28,29] and designed an audio-visual application to allow multiple users to create photo or audio posts through their own accounts on a shared smartphone. Users could reply to posts using photos or audio as well.…”

Let's "Downscale" Linked Data

“…Combining voice-, text-, and iconbased interfaces increases (mobile) ICT interfaces' usability for novice and low-literacy populations. 9 Illustrating this approach, the RadioMarché system from the EU-funded project Voices (www.mvoices.eu) lets farmers phone a service to announce what they have to sell and name the price they're asking for it. 10 The server then turns the different price information into a voice communiqué that can be broadcast locally via radio or that clients can listen to on demand when calling a specific number (see Figure 2).…”