Semi-literate Users Research Articles

Designing User Interfaces for Illiterate and Semi-Literate Users: A Systematic Review and Future Research Agenda

Using a systematic literature review, this review examines existing studies on the design, usability, user experience (UX), and adoption of computer applications designed for illiterate and semi-literate users. A total of 45 articles were reviewed from an initial set of 527 articles following an inclusion-exclusion criterion. As outcomes, in addition to synthesizing the present research activities, this review revealed a total of 16 design considerations or guidelines that may improve the usability, user experience, and adoption of software systems to illiterate and semi-literate people. The revealed design considerations were also investigated concerning the country context and application platform. Finally, a set of good rules categorized into five perspectives (uses of text, interaction pattern, uses of pictography, uses of audio-video, and info-architecture) were revealed to design and evaluate software systems to make them more usable to the illiterate and semi-literate users. The review also reveals future research opportunities that include: exploring the design considerations with respect to context-dependent applications; investigating the design requirements for public IT (e.g., vending machines and kiosks) systems; adopting the semiotic concept in UI design; developing a new usability evaluation framework; and exploring the effects of multi-platform and cross-country app design. Thus, the implication of this study is to discover the research gaps and provide future research directions aiming to design applications for illiterate and semi-literate users with enhanced usability and UX.

Human-Computer User Interface Design for Semiliterate and Illiterate Users

Information and Communication Technology (ICT) has revolutionized the lives of the people. The technology is embedded in daily life of literate or semiliterate/illiterate users. However, the user interface (UI) requirements for semiliterate/illiterate users are different from that of an educated person. The researchers of Human Computer Interaction for Development (HCI4D) face challenges to improve the usability of a UI for the semiliterate users. Therefore, a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) is conducted to provide a set of design factors and guidelines for UI development of semiliterate users. The study is based on extensive research gathered from literature to understand the user-centered design (UCD) approach, enhancing user experience (UX) for semiliterate users. This study analyses fifty two research articles that are published during 2010-2020. The findings shed light on the systematization of UI design guidelines for semiliterate/illiterate users. These guidelines can help in taking advantage of ICT during the COVID-19 pandemic. The analysis shows that seventeen main design factors are indispensable for designing UI of semiliterate users. The most suggested design factors include localization and graphics, which should be incorporated in UI for the target population. Moreover, the lag in the design factors as personalization and consistency open a road for future research.

Understanding the usability issues in contact management of illiterate and semi-literate users.

The effective utilization of a communication channel like calling a person involves two steps. The first step is storing the contact information of another user, and the second step is finding contact information to initiate a voice or text communication. However, the current smartphone interfaces for contact management are mainly textual; which leaves many emergent users at a severe disadvantage in using this most basic functionality to the fullest. Previous studies indicated that less-educated users adopt various coping strategies to store and identify contacts. However, all of these studies investigated the contact management issues of these users from a qualitative angle. Although qualitative or subjective investigations are very useful, they generally need to be augmented by a quantitative investigation for a comprehensive problem understanding. This work presents an exploratory study to identify the usability issues and coping strategies in contact management by emergent users; by using a mixture of qualitative and quantitative approaches. We identified coping strategies of the Pakistani population and the effectiveness of these strategies through a semi-structured qualitative study of 15 participants and a usability study of 9 participants, respectively. We then obtained logged data of 30 emergent and 30 traditional users, including contact-books and dual-channel (call and text messages) logs to infer a more detailed understanding; and to analyse the differences in the composition of contact-books of both user groups. The analysis of the log data confirmed problems that affect the emergent users’ communication behaviour due to the various difficulties they face in storing and searching contacts. Our findings revealed serious usability issues in current communication interfaces over smartphones. The emergent users were found to have smaller contact-books and preferred voice communication due to reading/writing difficulties. They also reported taking help from others for contact saving and text reading. The alternative contact management strategies adopted by our participants include: memorizing whole number or last few digits to recall important contacts; adding special character sequence with contact numbers for better recall; writing a contact from scratch rather than searching it in the phone-book; voice search; and use of recent call logs to redial a contact. The identified coping strategies of emergent users could aid the developers and designers to come up with solutions according to emergent users’ mental models and needs.

Designing an Online Appointment System for Semiliterate Users

Information and Communications Technology (ICT) has revolutionized the healthcare leading to provision of eHealth facilities remotely. During the peak time of COVID-19, as the long queues at health care facilities can result ... | Find, read and cite all the research you need on Tech Science Press

A usability design checklist for Mobile electronic data capturing forms: the validation process

BackgroundNew Specific Application Domain (SAD) heuristics or design principles are being developed to guide the design and evaluation of mobile applications in a bid to improve on the usability of these applications. This is because the existing heuristics are rather generic and are often unable to reveal a large number of mobile usability issues related to mobile specific interfaces and characteristics. Mobile Electronic Data Capturing Forms (MEDCFs) are one of such applications that are being used to collect health data particularly in hard to reach areas, but with a number of usability challenges especially when used in rural areas by semi literate users. Existing SAD design principles are often not used to evaluate mobile forms because their focus on features specific to data capture is minimal. In addition, some of these lists are extremely long rendering them difficult to use during the design and development of the mobile forms. The main aim of this study therefore was to generate a usability evaluation checklist that can be used to design and evaluate Mobile Electronic Data Capturing Forms in a bid to improve their usability. We also sought to compare the novice and expert developers’ views regarding usability criteria.MethodsWe conducted a literature review in August 2016 using key words on articles and gray literature, and those with a focus on heuristics for mobile applications, user interface designs of mobile devices and web forms were eligible for review. The data bases included the ACM digital library, IEEE-Xplore and Google scholar. We had a total of 242 papers after removing duplicates and a total of 10 articles which met the criteria were finally reviewed. This review resulted in an initial usability evaluation checklist consisting of 125 questions that could be adopted for designing MEDCFs. The questions that handled the five main categories in data capture namely; form content, form layout, input type, error handling and form submission were considered. A validation study was conducted with both novice and expert developers using a validation tool in a bid to refine the checklist which was based on 5 criteria. The criteria for the validation included utility, clarity, question naming, categorization and measurability, with utility and measurability having a higher weight respectively. We then determined the proportion of participants who agreed (scored 4 or 5), disagreed (scored 1 or 2) and were neutral (scored 3) to a given criteria regarding a particular question for each of the experts and novice developers. Finally, we selected questions that had an average of 85% agreement (scored 4 or 5) across all the 5 criteria by both novice and expert developers. ‘Agreement’ stands for capturing the same views or sentiments about the perceived likeness of an evaluation question.ResultsThe validation study reduced the initial 125 usability evaluation questions to 30 evaluation questions with the form layout category having the majority questions. Results from the validation showed higher levels of affirmativeness from the expert developers compared to those of the novice developers across the different criteria; however the general trend of agreement on relevance of usability questions was similar across all the criteria for the developers. The evaluation questions that were being validated were found to be useful, clear, properly named and categorized, however the measurability of the questions was found not to be satisfactory by both sets of developers. The developers attached great importance to the use of appropriate language and to the visibility of the help function, but in addition expert developers felt that indication of mandatory and optional fields coupled with the use of device information like the Global Positioning System (GPS) was equally important. And for both sets of developers, utility had the highest scores while measurability scored least.ConclusionThe generated checklist indicated the design features the software developers found necessary to improve the usability of mobile electronic data collection tools. In the future, we thus propose to test the effectiveness of the measure for suitability and performance based on this generated checklist, and test it on the end users (data collectors) with a purpose of picking their design requirements. Continuous testing with the end users will help refine the checklist to include only that which is most important in improving the data collectors’ experience.

Usability of Online Assistance From Semiliterate Users’ Perspective

As computer-based systems proliferate around the world, an increasing number of illiterate and semiliterate people come into contact with systems they do not understand. Unfortunately, these systems are increasingly important in one’s day-to-day life be it seeking employment through online applications, applying and receiving government services, seeking medical information, or simply becoming aware of current events. With more than 774 million people classified as illiterate or semiliterate, there is a need to better understand how to design user interfaces to allow this group of individuals access to online services. This article presents a study contrasting four different interface design styles providing online assistance for the task of completing an online internship application. One hundred eighty subjects in the Republic of Rwanda with low literacy skills were divided into four different groups to complete online task by using one of these interfaces. The results show that semiliterate users’ performance using the online assistance improved significantly and the percentage of completed tasks increased from 52% to 94%. Statistical analysis of the System Usability Scale indicates that their average subjective usability score boosted from 39 to 80 using the online assistance.

Text-Free User Interfaces for Illiterate and Semiliterate Users

We describe work toward the goal of a user interface designed such that even novice, illiterate users require absolutely no intervention from anyone at all to use. Our text-free user interface is based on many hours of ethnographic design conducted in collaboration with a community of illiterate domestic labourers 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 labourers, 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. The paper describes the design process, the design principles which evolved out of the process, the final application design, and results from initial user testing. Our results confirm previous work that emphasizes the need for semi-abstracted 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.