MIT OpenCourseWare http://ocw.mit.edu MAS.965 / 6.976 / SP.716 NextLab I: Designing Mobile Technologies for the Next Billion Users Fall 2008 For information about citing these materials or our Terms of Use, visit: http://ocw.mit.edu/terms.Text-Free User Interfaces for Illiterate and Semiliterate Users MEDHI, SAGAR, TOYAMAIndrani Medhi Assistant Researcher Microsoft Research India 196/36, 2nd Main Sadashivnagar Bangalore 560080 India [email protected] Aman Sagar Adobe Systems India Pvt. Ltd. Noida, India Kentaro Toyama Microsoft Research India Bangalore, India Text-Free User Interfaces for Illiterate and Semiliterate Users 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 under-stand what kind of application subjects would be interested in, how they re-spond to computing technology, and how they react to speciªc UI elements. We built two applications using these principles, one for job search for domes-tic 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 princi-ples, which evolved out of the process, the ªnal application designs, and re-sults from initial user testing. Our results conªrm previous work that empha-sizes the need for semiabstracted graphics and voice feedback, but we additionally ªnd 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 in-terfaces 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. Most computer applications pose an accessibility barrier to those who are unable to read ºuently. The heavy use of text on everything from menus to document content means that those who are illiterate or semiliterate are not able to access functions and services implemented on most com-puter software. It does not have to be this way. In particular, while there might be lim-its to what static books can convey without text, computers are the ulti-mate multimedia device. Through the use of graphics, animation, and audio, they have the potential to be wholly intelligible to a person who cannot read (Huenerfauth, 2002). The basic features of what we call a text-free user interface (UI) are simple to understand: liberal use of graphics and photographs for visual information, and voice for providing information normally provided via text. However, research to date on UIs for illiterate users remains scant, and existing work presents broad design guidelines that do not address all of the issues. The work presented in this article was motivated by a single goal: to provide useful applications to communities of illiterate users, with a UI designed such that even novice, illiterate users required absolutely no in-© The MIT Press 2008. Published under Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial-NoDerivativeWorks Unported 3.0 license. All rights not granted thereunder to the public are reserved to the publisher and may not be exercised without its express written permission. Volume 4, Number 1, Fall 2007, 37–50 37TEXT-FREE USER INTERFACES FOR ILLITERATE AND SEMILITERATE USERS Figure 1. Site visit: at the houses of our target users. tervention from anyone at all to use. In particular, we felt that if the UI were designed well, users would not require formal literacy, computer skills, or any external assistance in order to operate the application. We certainly have not achieved this ambitious goal, but in the process of aiming for it, we have uncovered some of the subtler issues that require consideration when designing any text-free UI. We are also encouraged that the goal is not that far out of reach. This article presents two applications that were designed using ethnographic or contextual design techniques to ferret out the requirements for a text-free UI. In the ªrst, an employment-search applica-tion, the intent is to provide job information to a group of domestic laborers. In the second, we ex-plore a text-free UI for maps that should allow illiter-ate users to answer questions having a geographic dimension. Our approach is one of contextual or ethno-graphic design (Crabtree & Rodden, 2002; Wasson, 2002) in which intense interaction with a target community is sought to gain a thorough under-standing of their real needs, real traits, and real re-sponses to the interfaces we designed. Ultimately, we spent a total of more than 180 hours working with women in Bangalore slums to get feedback on our UI. Section 2 of this article describes our target com-munity and Section 3 gives an overview of the ethnographic design process. Section 4 describes a set of core design principles along with examples of many of the design details that we came upon dur-ing the iterative design process. Section 5 describes the ªnal prototypes to which these principles were applied. These prototypes were then tested with subjects who were drawn from the same community but had not been exposed to the applications during the design process. We based our project in three ur-ban slum communities in Banga-lore, India. To gain access into these communities we worked with a nongovernmental organization called Stree Jagruti Samiti, which has had an established pres-ence in these three slums for 15 years. Because Stree Jagruti Samiti works primarily with the women in the slums, we also focused on the needs of the women for one of our projects (Figure 1). Most of the women in the slums are household workers, either illiterate or semiliterate (highest edu-cation attained being schooling up to the sixth grade). The male members of the house are usually daily wage laborers like plumbers, carpenters, con-struction workers, mechanics, bar benders, and fruit and vegetable vendors. Their primary language of communication is Kannada, which is also their na-tive language. Apart from this a few people also spoke Hindi and Tamil. The average household