Effect of Icon Concreteness, Semantic Distance and Familiarity on recognition level of mobile phone icons among E-literate and Non E-literates

Cell phones have turn out to be the most central communication gadget in our daily life. This results in an enormously intense competition between almost all the mobile phone vendors. Despite of manufacturer’s diverse types of advertising strategies such as exceptional price cut offers or modern attractive functions, what really matter is whether this everyday communication gadget has been designed according to the preference and requirements of all types of users. The miniature type screen interface design is one of the recent research themes of the Human-Computer Interaction domain. Because of the restricted screen size, “icons” have been considered as dominant part in usability of cell phones. This paper measures the recognition level of icons among e-literate and non-e-literate people. This article explores the effect of icon characteristic on recognition level of icons among e-literates and non e-literate users. It was found that designers of mobile phone icons have to balance a trade-off between the need, requirements and understanding of both e-literate and non eliterate users.