User Interface Design for Low-literate and Novice Users: Past, Present and Future

One of the greatest challenges in providing information and communi-cation technology access is that about 775 million people in the worldare completely non-literate and many are able to read only with greatdifficulty and effort. Even though mobile phone penetration is growingvery fast, people with low levels of literacy have been found to avoidcomplex functions, and primarily use mobile phones for voice commu-nication only. This monograph looks at how we can design ICT userinterfaces (UIs) such that novice and low-literate users can access abroad range of services and utilities, increasingly available to them,with minimal training and external assistance. It begins by observingthe challenges in designing for low-literate users, and in conductinguser studies among low-income communities in the developing world.It discusses techniques used by researchers in overcoming some of thesechallenges. It presents a review of existing examples of UIs for noviceand low-literate users, which have used various combinations of input–output modalities other than text. It goes on to discuss strong trendsthat are starting to emerge in this design space and concludes withopportunities and future directions for research and design of UIs tar-geted at populations with low-literacy. I. Medhi Thies. User Interface Design for Low-literate and Novice Users: Past,Present and Future. Foundations and Trends© in Human-Computer Interaction,vol. 8, no. 1, pp. 1–72, 2014. Copyright c© 2015 I. Medhi ThiesDOI: 10.1561/1100000047.Full text available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1561/1100000047