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Text is not the enemy:
How illiterates’ use their mobile phones
Hendrik Knoche
EPFL
Station 14, IC LDM
hendrik.knoche@epfl.ch
Jeffrey Huang
EPFL
Station 14, IC LDM
jeffrey.huang@epfl.ch
ABSTRACT
Despite 800 million illiterate people worldwide little
research has aimed at understanding how they use and
appropriate mobile phones. We interviewed illiterate
immigrants living in Switzerland to inform the design of
phones and applications for illiterate users. We report on
their use, coping strategies, and appropriation of mobile
devices and other media to manage their lives. We found
that text represented a valuable component for managing
contacts in current smart phones. We provide design
recommendations for mobile phone interfaces for illiterate
and semi-literate users.
Author Keywords
HCI4D, ICTD, illiteracy, mobile phone use, touch screens
ACM Classification Keywords
H5.m. Information interfaces and presentation (e.g., HCI):
Miscellaneous.
General Terms
Human Factors, Languages
INTRODUCTION
Around 800 million people worldwide cannot read or write
their mother tongue. Most of them live in developing
countries and the majority of those in rural areas. The
business model of mobile phones has proved viable in
developing countries and coverage has been improving
despite infrastructural shortcomings in terms of, e.g. the
availability of electricity. Penetration of mobile devices has
taken off despite limited power availability for charging
devices, high call charges, and high cost of ownership
relative to income. While much ICTD (information
communication for development) research has found
problems and shortcomings of mobile user interfaces (UI)
in usability tests, e.g. icons that are not culturally adapted
[7], no local language support and hardly any support for
illiterate users, uptake of these devices “in the wild” is
staggering. It is clear that incentives to overcome initial UI
hurdles are underappreciated [13]. Given the current
technological speed of advances in the mobile domain we
can assume that within the next few years low-end smart
phones (most likely with touch screens) will become
affordable for illiterates in developing countries. We look
at how illiterate immigrants in Switzerland have
appropriated smart and feature phones in their daily life to
inform the design of smart phones UIs to make them more
accessible and easier to use by illiterates.
The background summarizes previous ICTD work on
illiterates and user interfaces (UI) tailor made for them. The
results from interviews we conducted with illiterates
include their use, coping strategies, and appropriation of
mobile devices and other media to manage their lives. In
the discussion we argue for better supporting text in
conjunction with other media in mobile devices for
illiterate and semi-literates.
BACKGROUND
Literacy can be defined in many ways. The U.N. defines a
literate person as someone who can “…with understanding,
both read and write a short simple statement in his or her
everyday life” [15]. Illiterate people may have basic
numeracy skills, i.e., they can to some degree understand,
read and write numbers. The two most noteworthy
exceptions to the dearth of published research on illiterate
mobile phone use are Chipcase [2] and Lalji et al. [7].
Conducting ethnographic studies of illiterate mobile users
in several Asian countries, Chipchase reported that while
illiterates could successfully turn on their phones and
accept incoming calls, dialing numbers to make outgoing
calls proved difficult for some. Nor could the illiterate users
send text messages or use the address book on their phone.
Lalji et al. found that illiterates used call logs in lieu of the
address book [7] but that this proved challenging when
having to remember how many calls ago someone had
called.
More research on illiterates and their needs mobile phone
UIs has been conducted in lab studies. This body of
research concurred about the value of audio support and
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graphics in UIs for illiterates but provided differing
recommendations or went against current design
conventions. Controversial UI topics included the issues of
in- [16] or exclusion [12],[11] of text labels, and use of
drawings [10] instead of icons. Common UI components -
the concept of soft-keys, vertical scrollbars, short text
labels [8], [9] and the concept of a focus in lists [7] - were
described as hard to understand. To some degree, these
findings run counter to Chipchase and Lalji et al.’s results,
the large increase in mobile phone ownership of illiterates
and semi-literates despite employment of these UI
concepts, and that computer literates had to learn these
conventions, too. We need to understand how illiterates
eventually use their mobile phones when embedded in a
socio-technical context in real life. In summary, more
research is warranted, especially considering the rapid
uptake of mobile phones in the developing world by
illiterate and semi-literate users and the current changes in
the mobile phone market with its trend towards smart and
touch screen phones.
STUDY
We carried out semi-structured interviews (60-90minutes in
duration) in cafes or the participants’ homes. All
9 participants (7f, 2m) had immigrated from Africa or Latin
America to Switzerland and recently started a course to
learn how to read and write. The interview included topics
such as a typical day, problems or inconveniences faced,
media used in the home, means of communication and
information, interacting with necessary machinery, e.g.
automated teller machines (ATMs), and a focus on the use
of their mobile phones. We wanted to know how they
received and placed calls and managed contacts; we also
probed for other functions that they used.
Outside the phone
Our participants employed a number of strategies to
retrieve telephone numbers of contacts that were stored on
paper, e.g. business cards, telephone registers and pieces of
paper that they could tell apart from spatial arrangements
locations in note- or telephone registers, special colors of
ink or paper, patterns, doodles, or shapes of paper, business
cards (some enhanced with the owners’ pictures). Spatial
location in the homes (near or on doors, fridges, calendars,
telephone register) aided recall through opportunistic
encounters and provision of additional context.
Unlike in Lalji’s study our interviewees could all tell digital
time and read numbers. Almost half of the Swiss
participants made use of paper calendars to some degree.
Almost exclusively they only noted down the times of
meetings in the slot for a day (on calendars with a grid) not
with whom or where. One exception to these handwritten
notes were cards given to them for doctor’s appointments
that contained the time, date and contextual information
about the doctor.
Our interviewees faced problems finding their way around
or recovering from getting lost in the city. They often asked
for directions, described landmarks to friends on the phone
or took taxis home to recover from being lost. They also
had trouble meeting dietary or religious requirements when
shopping for food.
Living in a foreign country, our participants needed to stay
in touch with family and friends in their home countries.
Calling abroad was expensive and they often used internet
cafes’ to make calls through special operators or VoIP,
which required synchronizing with the other party to be at a
certain place at a certain time. Many considered
asynchronous communication such as SMS a convenient
and cost-efficient alternative for staying in touch.
Moreover, some had been asked by others to send texts
rather than call. However, the need to read and write
seemed an insurmountable barrier to using the SMS feature
to contact people.
Inside the phone
The director of the school who put us in contact with our
participants was not sure whether they were actually using
mobile phones. However, all of our interviewees owned at
least one mobile phone. The phones they used were
surprisingly advanced and expensive. The latest iPhones or
other fashionable feature phones were common. A typical
response when prompted about their decision to obtain
these high-end phones was: “Everyone has these [pointing
to his iPhone] now – so why shouldn’t I? Just because I
cannot read doesn’t mean that I’m stupid.” However, due
to their high reliance on voice calls many participants had
relatively expensive calling plans and the interviewee
above had been offered the iPhone as a free upgrade to his
99 CHF per month plan.
Rote memorization
The speed at which they traversed the phone menus was the
same as for literate people. We often had to ask our
interviewees to slow down when they were showing us
how they performed certain tasks on their phones. They
mastered important functionality through rote learning:
“After I have clicked on this icon I need to go down twice
and then – click! - I’m done.” This was the same technique
that they used to learn how to operate other important
digital interfaces such as ATMs and game consoles. Family
or friends assisted during the memorization phase and they
repeated the procedures in their presence as many times as
needed. Icons served as landmarks and sometimes the
shape or length of text allowed the people to orient
themselves in the interface. Continuous help was necessary
for smart phone owners to download apps, games, music,
ringtones, install customizations (e.g. a different unlock
button on the iPhone) and both celebrity and personal
picture wallpapers.
Text messaging
All of them had received text messages, though they were
often unsolicited. How they dealt with received text
messages varied and depended to some degree on the
content. Some had developed simple heuristics in detecting
unsolicited messages through the length of the sending
telephone number and the fact that the message contained a
lot of text. Most interviewees responded to an incoming
SMS by calling the sender – either they had memorized
how to do this through the context menu or they noted
down the number and typed it into the phone again. Some
of our interviewees treated all messages as spam and had
learned either how to exit the received message mode or
how to quickly delete them without checking the content or
their origin. Others asked for help with the content of the
text messages. None of the interviewees felt particularly
bad about this approach but one who was in a new
relationship found asking close friends to read messages
with romantic content exciting at first but then increasingly
annoying. One participant wondered whether it would be
possible to forward a message to a service and listen to the
content on the phone through a human or machine voice.
Retrieving contacts
Call logs were valued for their quick access and all of our
interviewees made use of them. One recently contacted log,
which aggregated recent calls of contacts and sorted them
in descending order and left the most recently contacted
person on top (either as a telephone number or the name of
the contact) was particularly valued by its user: “This is the
single most useful thing about this phone. One button click
and I’m with my daughter [the only text entry on the top of
the list].” All the interviewees besides her had more than
50 contacts stored in their address books. The few
completely spelled out names (first name or full name) had
been entered by friends or family members themselves. The
names often served as symbolic icons or landmarks since
most remaining contacts or call log entries contained only
numbers. However, the use of some text allowed them to
filter and group large amounts of data. Some had taken
these entries as seeds to venture further. “[pointing to the
textual contact list entry] This is Michel. So I know his
name starts with M. So this must be an M. And I have this
other friend, Mmmmansour. He starts with M, too. So this
is an M and down here [pointing to the keyboard] is the M
and I enter it. But the rest I cannot write and I just make it
up.”
Many entries were either approximated by the first letter of
the name supplemented with invented characters, e.g. Mx#-
-, or just the first letter of the name. However, in many
cases, and especially with duplicates resulting from the first
letter strategy, they had to open each contact individually
and try to recognize the contact. They did this by checking
the country code, city code, other salient features in the
telephone number, e.g. repetitions “222” or, in many cases,
its last three digits. The more duplicates, the more onerous
this task became due to the way the address books treat
entries that contain first or last names. In the list views of
call logs and the address book text took precedence and
was shown in lieu of the number that was shown for entries
without text. All of our participants knew how to take
pictures and retrieve them but their use for contacts was
limited.
Three of our interviewees had stored SMS messages that
contained telephone numbers for months as another way of
looking up contacts. “I know X sent me this text message
that has the telephone number from a friend of mine in
Togo. So I go back here [to the inbox of his messages] and
need to find his message. Here this is it. He wrote this text
in front of the number – my wife read it to me. It’s the name
of the friend.”
Calendar use
Some illiterates used the calendar in their mobile phone to
identify the current date or - for those that had learned the
mapping of written words or their short hands
(MTWTFSS) to the weekdays - the day of the week. A
large proportion of the participants made use of the alarm
functions on their phones and one of them had extended
this to keeping alarms in his iPhone as reminders for
meetings, events and appointments. The only information
stored in the alarm was the time. This was different from
the use of paper calendars insofar as the remaining
information, e.g. the day of the week or the date and the
purpose of the commitment, had to be remembered. This
required diligence in deleting alarms after each event had
occurred, e.g. a doctor’s appointment; otherwise the
participant explained that he would get confused and try to
remember what an alarm was supposed to remind him of. A
separate application reminded him when it was time to
pray.
Child mode
The three mothers we interviewed had used their mobile
phones to pacify their children despite worries about the
children changing or deleting information. They were
interested in having a way to secure the phone such that
their children could safely play with it without deleting
contacts, incurring costs, or changing settings.
DISCUSSION
A number of studies have suggested removing text from
UIs for illiterates. However, we think that this might be a
foregone conclusion based on the reliance on UI usability
testing without considering the long-term appropriation of
applications and the different roles of text as part of a status
symbol, a generic or learned symbol capable of
disambiguating, and as an aid in proxy-literacy.
Phones were as much a status symbol for illiterates in
Switzerland as in developing regions [2]. The Motorola
Motofone F3 designed for poor, illiterates was light, very
rugged, and provided audio feedback for its functions from
power on throughout its main (minimal) menu. Its e-ink
screen could easily be read in bright sunlight, it had a
phenomenal battery life (nominally 30 days on standby)
and, at around 20USD it was affordable. However, it was
not a success. According to an unnamed Motorola source
the company had underestimated the aspirational aspects of
the device. Given that many people see mobile phones as
extensions of themselves they did not want to be seen with
a cheap phone.
Chipchase argued against making phones for illiterates
recognizable because of the associated stigma. Text-free
interfaces could give away someone’s illiteracy as mobile
phone UIs are often visible to others. The same goes for
constant audio feedback as provided through current
accessibility tools (iPhone, talkback on Android) that target
visually impaired users and read out all UI parts.
All the techniques illiterates used in the physical world to
manage information, e.g., spatial arrangements, shapes,
colors, handwriting and doodles, were absent from contact
lists and calendars in their phones. Pictures in address
books were one of the few exceptions but these are not
always available for contacts, are not searchable and cannot
filter large lists. For our participants text provided some
valuable benefits that many of our participants reaped over
time. In their address books even some text proved useful
to identify, disambiguate or search contacts. Unfortunately,
our participants’ address books supplanted the telephone
numbers in the interface in an either text or number fashion
which complicated identification due to many duplicate
names. The current reliance on text as the main method for
accessing and storing information on mobile devices is
making the learning stage for illiterates cumbersome.
However, removing text would cause problems for the
literates enlisted to help the illiterates learn to operate the
device. Omission of text would not allow people to
discover and encourage use with one of humanity’s most
valued cultural techniques. Srivastava [14] an India NGO
has started encouraging women to buy mobile phones
English because of the potential to learn various alphabets
through them. Every day exposure to text in conjunction
with audio in same language subtitles of movie content was
also shown to improve reading and writing skills in neo-
literates [6]. Semi-literates in Findlater et al.’s study
benefited from combination of text and audio and had
superior word recognition at the end of each session after
the second day of use [3].
DESIGN RECOMMENDATIONS
We derive the following design recommendations for smart
phones for illiterates from the findings and related work:
A. Avoid stigmatizing physical design of the phone
B. Use text in the interface for controls (plus icons) and
content to aid helpers
- provide audio feedback in the interface as suggested
by Mehdi et al. but on-demand (e.g. to support answer
to “What is this?”) and not ‘always on’ as in
accessibility functions for blind people. In touch screen
phones this will be easier to achieve through a
consistent gesture such as a long-tap.
- provide audio rendition for text messages (read-out
function) as done in [4]
- provide speech to text entry for SMS composition
- integrate audio feedback on maps for textual content
such as street names and landmarks
C. Enhance contacts and their listings by providing
additional graphical discriminators (colours, symbols) as
done in work by Bhamidipaty et al. [1] and Joshi et al. [5].
D. Augment calendars with voice notes, pictures and
drawings/doodles
E. Provide access to voice note reminders based on location
(audible post-it notes)
F. Provide a child-safe (read-only) mode
G. Include name, number, date and time in the last call list
entries
CONCLUSION
Designing for illiterates should leverage multiple media
and create more robust and supple interactions in the socio-
technical setting in which they learn and make use of
mobile devices. Illiterates aspire to owning the same
phones as literates and have effective coping strategies to
overcome their inability to read both in the physical world
and on mobile phones. The latter, however, have reduced
capabilities to structure and recall information. Contrary to
earlier research on illiterates we found that immigrants in
Switzerland made used of contact lists and SMS, to some
degree, to manage contacts. A number of changes to mobile
phone UIs could empower them further: optional text-to-
speech throughout the interface especially for SMS, OCR-
to-speech, the ability to attach voice notes and possibly
pictures to calendar entries and contacts, maps with audio
support for reading out the names of roads and landmarks,
and contact managers that allow for filtering through visual
attributes and read-only access children.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We would like to express our gratitude to Anne Marquis,
Catherine Wick, Annick Mello Spano and the teachers
from Lire-et-écrire and Français-en-jeu and all interviewees
for their time; This research has been funded by the Swiss
Development Council in collaboration with
cooperation@EPFL.
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