skip to main content
10.1145/3027063.3058589acmconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PageschiConference Proceedingsconference-collections
brief-report

SIGCHI Social Impact Award Talk -- Designing for Low-Literate Users

Published: 06 May 2017 Publication History

Abstract

About 800 million people in the world are completely non-literate and many are able to read only with great difficulty and effort. Even though mobile phone penetration is growing very fast, people with low levels of literacy have been found to avoid complex functions, and primarily use mobile phones for voice communication only. "Text-Free UIs" are design principles and recommendations for computer-human interfaces that would allow a first-time, non-literate person, on first contact with a PC or a mobile phone, to immediately realize useful interaction with minimal or no external assistance. Through an ethnographic design and iterative prototyping process involving hundreds of hours spent in the field among low-income, low-literate communities across rural and urban India, the Philippines and South Africa, we established design principles that use combinations of voice, video and graphics. We have applied these principles across several application domains, including job-search for domestic workers, health-information dissemination, map navigation, mobile money transfer, agriculture video search, and social networking for farmers. Rigorous user evaluations confirm that our non-textual designs are strongly preferred over standard text-based interfaces, and that first-time, non-literate users are, in fact, able to navigate through our UIs meaningfully.

Cited By

View all
  • (2023)Defining Functional Illiteracy to Empower Inclusive Technology DesignProceedings of the 4th African Human Computer Interaction Conference10.1145/3628096.3629064(254-258)Online publication date: 27-Nov-2023
  • (2023)Advancing HCI Research and Education within and across South AsiaExtended Abstracts of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3544549.3573815(1-6)Online publication date: 19-Apr-2023
  • (2021)From the Margins to the Centre: Defining New Mission and Vision for HCI Research in South AsiaExtended Abstracts of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3411763.3441327(1-6)Online publication date: 8-May-2021
  • Show More Cited By

Index Terms

  1. SIGCHI Social Impact Award Talk -- Designing for Low-Literate Users

    Recommendations

    Comments

    Information & Contributors

    Information

    Published In

    cover image ACM Conferences
    CHI EA '17: Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems
    May 2017
    3954 pages
    ISBN:9781450346566
    DOI:10.1145/3027063
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.

    Sponsors

    Publisher

    Association for Computing Machinery

    New York, NY, United States

    Publication History

    Published: 06 May 2017

    Check for updates

    Author Tags

    1. design
    2. low-literacy

    Qualifiers

    • Brief-report

    Conference

    CHI '17
    Sponsor:

    Acceptance Rates

    CHI EA '17 Paper Acceptance Rate 1,000 of 5,000 submissions, 20%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 6,164 of 23,696 submissions, 26%

    Upcoming Conference

    CHI 2025
    ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
    April 26 - May 1, 2025
    Yokohama , Japan

    Contributors

    Other Metrics

    Bibliometrics & Citations

    Bibliometrics

    Article Metrics

    • Downloads (Last 12 months)7
    • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)0
    Reflects downloads up to 13 Feb 2025

    Other Metrics

    Citations

    Cited By

    View all
    • (2023)Defining Functional Illiteracy to Empower Inclusive Technology DesignProceedings of the 4th African Human Computer Interaction Conference10.1145/3628096.3629064(254-258)Online publication date: 27-Nov-2023
    • (2023)Advancing HCI Research and Education within and across South AsiaExtended Abstracts of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3544549.3573815(1-6)Online publication date: 19-Apr-2023
    • (2021)From the Margins to the Centre: Defining New Mission and Vision for HCI Research in South AsiaExtended Abstracts of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3411763.3441327(1-6)Online publication date: 8-May-2021
    • (2019)Assessing Mobile Phone Digital Literacy and Engagement in User-Centered Design in a Diverse, Safety-Net Population: Mixed Methods StudyJMIR mHealth and uHealth10.2196/142507:8(e14250)Online publication date: 29-Aug-2019

    View Options

    Login options

    View options

    PDF

    View or Download as a PDF file.

    PDF

    eReader

    View online with eReader.

    eReader

    Figures

    Tables

    Media

    Share

    Share

    Share this Publication link

    Share on social media