15 ms·

How illiterate people use their mobile phones (2012)

155 points by kvee 5y ago

newsbinator 5y ago
> 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.
- lotyrin 5y ago
  This reminds me of a certain facet of computer literacy: exploration. There are users who will only seek out menu items in software if they already know they are there and where, compared to users who will seek out the items they are looking for and can imagine that they probably do exist somewhere. It's unimaginable to the latter user that one would possibly have to "learn" how to use Google Docs having only ever been exposed to MS Word, while the former is completely lost because the menus have to be re-learned and all the possibilities available to them must be re-memorized.
  - imoverclocked 5y ago
    Beautifully put. I've experienced this dichotomy so many times in many different contexts. Being literate and being able to explore are extremely empowering gifts.
  - hughrr 5y ago
    I was a contractor once and was basically used as a scapegoat after being asked to move some UI bits for the sake of consistency. This was moving the OK and Cancel buttons on every single dialog window so they were in the same consistent place. The customers shit the bed and the change rolled back and an “unspecified contractor” was blamed for “an unauthorised change”. I chose not to renew that one.
    - BitwiseFool 5y ago
      They should have done them one at a time. You can reasonably gaslight the client that way. I sometimes forget whether or not OK should be on the left or right of Cancel.
      - bcraven 5y ago
        https://help.duo.com/s/article/7231?language=en_US https://help.duo.com/s/article/7231?language=en_US The Duo authentication app recently swapped the 'Accept' and 'Deny' buttons and it was unbelievably frustrating.
      - _dain_ 5y ago
        It's amazing that I use computers all the time and I can't remember what the standard placement of OK/Cancel is, offhand. It's like how nobody can remember which way the Queen faces on a coin.
        ralfd 5y ago
        Actually that is easy to remember, because OK/Cancel is the wrong Windows way and Cancel/VerbOfAction the enlightened Apple way. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17269938 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17269938 > Windows puts OK first Apple puts OK last Gnome, iOS and Android followed Apples style, which influences Web Apps.
  - code_duck 5y ago
    That makes me think of how many times I've had to ask people "what does the error message on the screen say?" or tell my parents "the words that it says on the screen - read them, the program/website is trying to tell you something". When it comes to software many users are functionally illiterate because they don't even try to read alert windows or error messages, assuming that they will be meaningless.
    - ehutch79 5y ago
      THIS. So much this.
    - svachalek 5y ago
      Yup, I've seen this a lot. This type of user basically operates like a script, they move through a memorized list of steps and when they can't go forward they simply throw an exception.
      - tn1 5y ago
        not even really an exception, they're more a like a PHP script that just ignores errors and continues
    - AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
      > they don't even try to read alert windows or error messages, assuming that they will be meaningless I work in IT and I can assure you that software developers have been doing their best for the past 20 years to live up to that expectation.
      - 6510 5y ago
        I'm currently breaking my head trying to fix a "you didn't fill out all fields" error for a form with only hidden fields. I keep thinking how useful the message must be to the user.
    - gknoy 5y ago
      I still recall my father having various error messages from software (browsers, website, Word, etc), and when I'd translate them it was almost always a case of the error message being meaningful to me _but not in those words_, and so when I'd translate them for him he'd ask, "why didn't the error message say THAT?". It still is something I think about occasionally when trying to write logging or error messages -- how we got there, how to fix it, etc.
  - newsbinator 5y ago
    Anybody have ideas on why the age divide on expectation + exploration vs. memorization seems so stark? In my experience the top predictor of whether a person can use a computer to do what they intended to do is age. Not IQ, not other mechanical or technical competence, not education, not cultural background, not linguistic aptitude, not reading speed, not creativity, not engineering or product design experience... mainly age. (with outliers of course)
    - OkayPhysicist 5y ago
      My guess is it's about how curious about new things you were when computers got popular. Computers are, compared to a lot of real world devices, a lot more complicated than pretty much any consumer tool that predates them, but also more forgiving. Most consumer appliances before computers had at most a couple of settings, all of which were clearly defined and handed to you. Anything beyond that involved aggressive tinkering that may or may not go well. Computers, on the other hand, have interfaces that are vastly larger than any human brain could hope to contain. So they require exploration. This comes naturally to children, less so to fully matured adults, and is extremely rare in people middle-aged or beyond. So you get a line based on how old they were when they first got their hands on a computer.
    - netsharc 5y ago
      It probably has to do with older people being introduced to computers as big, complicated machines with consequences if you mess up, while younger people were first exposed to computer games as kids and knowing it's possible to undo stuff. Until they end up coding a buggy smart contract and losing 6 figures.
    - IIAOPSW 5y ago
      The thing I've noticed about people on the other side of the divide is this irrational fear that doing anything incorrect, even once, is going to completely brick their device and cost a bunch of money. So they develop these weird superstitions and go through the ritualistic rote-learned menu clicks because exploration doesn't feel safe. I don't know the origin of this attitude.
  - MonaroVXR 5y ago
    Relearn everything? I use the Apple, Google and Office Suite interchangeable, you don't need to relearn everything.
- lkbm 5y ago
  This is no surprise to me. My dad wrote batch files when I was a kid. 98.bat give a list of items numbered 1-15. 3.bat then took you to a games directory wherein 99.bat gave you another numbered list list of 30+ games to choose from. I memorized nearly every number on both menus before I could read.
  - jamiek88 5y ago
    Same but for porn.
    - saagarjha 5y ago
      …hopefully not before you learned to read.
- _dain_ 5y ago
  This is basically how my parents and grandparents navigate computers, despite being perfectly capable of reading. It infuriates me when tech companies just move shit around in the interface for no good reason and I have to teach them how to use it all over again. UI/UX people consistently fail this slice of people by not keeping to a stable interface.
lifeisstillgood 5y ago
Favourite fact of the moment : illiterate humans built the walls of jericho as it was built 2,000 years before writing was invented. Text is a jet fuel for humanity, not a requirement for success. I am only saddened that "we" have let down those 800M by not giving them a basic education
- drcross 5y ago
  I know someone with very bad dyslexia and it's not that he didn't get a basic education, it's that he can't understand written text or menu items more than one layer deep. He calls if wants to communicate which is very endearing but I also have major misgivings with modern UI paradigms. The "three dashed lines" that you see everywhere are infuriating.
  - zdragnar 5y ago
    Do visual icons like the three lines for a menu help or hurt the usability of an application for people with dyslexia? I had assumed iconography was a boon for illiterate people- thinking primarily of symbols on shop signs or a striped barbers pole, for example.
    - justsomehnguy 5y ago
      > Do visual icons like the three lines They hurt usability even for people perfectly capable of reading. Especially when Material fanboy fill everything with whitespace and bans black for the text.
gleenn 5y ago
I was learning Japanese in Tokyo while also working on a small-business accounting app. Japanese accounting is extremely specific, so even for someone enrolled in classes, there was no way I would be learning all those kanji any time soon. I impressed a Japanese co-worker though, because I quickly learned visually where the buttons I needed to click were so I could copy the app features from iPhone to Android. Turns out you don't have to be able to read almost anything as long as you see something used correctly and can remember button locations visually etc.
- Beltalowda 5y ago
  When I was young I played a lot of Japanese games on the MSX like this: try stuff, see what happens, memorize, repeat as needed. I played through SD Snatcher and some other games like this. Kids can have a lot of patience in a weird way like that. Today I'd probably give up after a few minutes.
  - qwertycrackers 5y ago
    When my younger brother was very young (perhaps 5 or 6 years old), he inherited my old Gameboy Color with my copy of Pokemon Crystal, which I had left saved at some random point midway through the game. He, not knowing how to read, never realized that there was such a thing as saves or progress in the game. In his mind, that save point was his "start point", where he would always begin his adventures and the pokemon I had left him with were the only ones he ever used. He loved to run around in the wild battling pokemon and occasionally making very accidental progress away from his "start point". One time, he managed to stumble his way into using Cut to remove a tree and entered a whole new world of things to explore! After a while he become totally lost, and wanting to return to familiar territory he simply restarted the Game Boy and was right back where he knew. We continue to find much humor in the degree to which children can make any random experience a fun adventure.
    - wincy 5y ago
      My daughter loves to play “that spaceship game” (Among Us) despite not knowing how to read. She had great fun running around and looking at everything. She knows how to join lobbies. It’s probably good she doesn’t know how to read as I’d imagine there are a lot of very angry 12 year olds throwing expletives her way for being “bad” at the game.
smackeyacky 5y ago
Funny story from a school teacher: One of the kids she has is determinedly illiterate (7 years old, pretty poor family background) but said kid, after "borrowing" one of the class iPads during lunch hour managed to search up a pile of pornography and got caught. Teachers were somewhat perplexed how this kid who barely manages to write his own name searches up some fairly complicated terms. He did it by simply using the iPad speech recognition system.
- Spooky23 5y ago
  Suggestion engines are powerful too. When my son was just about 3, he could navigate YouTube from and arbitrary point to Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends or a particular garbage truck video.
  - _carbyau_ 5y ago
    This. I've heard stories about kids effectively using the suggestions as a multi link menu system. They open the site, look for one familiar suggestion to start off on, and follow the web from there.
- mrtksn 5y ago
  Kids can do genius stuff, they are very very open to experimentation and out of the box thinking(as they don't have a box to start with, I guess). I recall someones kid discovering that clicking on ads in games opens the safari within the app, finding their way from there into Google, therefore bypassing the parental restrictions.
- teunispeters 5y ago
  On a related note, my daughter (grade 1) uses speech recognition to do spell checking and confirm how a word is spelled. Mind, she does complicated words like "imposter" and "infected". (real example, and yes she's found "Among Us" playthrough videos...)
jsherwani 5y ago
My PhD thesis focused on voice interface design for people with limited literacy skills. One of the most surprising discoveries for me was that menus and even lists of items aren’t natural concepts that exist outside of a context of literacy. Even for voice interfaces, a touch tone menu (“for X press 1, for Y press 2...”) was a lot harder to navigate than an equivalent voice-based menu (“would you like X, Y, or Z?”). As a side project during my final year of my thesis research, I wrote an iPhone app that unexpectedly propelled me into the world of entrepreneurship, so I ended up pursuing the startup life after I graduated. But this space is still fascinating to me.
- urthor 5y ago
  Speech Interfaces for Information Access By Low Literate Users I presume?
- thomasz 5y ago
  Is it online somewhere?
- tpoacher 5y ago
  I would also be interested to read your thesis, if you don't mind linking to it :) edit: also, pop looks very nice! congrats!
  - _boffin_ 5y ago
    https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~jsherwan/JS-thesis.pdf https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~jsherwan/JS-thesis.pdf
    - jsherwani 5y ago
      Yes, that’s it! An easier and shorter read may be the final paper I published in that domain, which talks more about the difference between literate and low/non-literate users: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~jsherwan/pubs/orality-hcid-itid09.pdf http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~jsherwan/pubs/orality-hcid-itid09.pdf
- 5y ago
serverlessmom 5y ago
This is really interesting. It reminds me of a conversation I had recently with a friend of mine who struggles a lot with spelling. His first language is English and even so sometimes it is hard to decipher what he means when he messages me. Recently he asked me how to spell something and I said, "You spell it exactly how it sounds," and he told me that doesn't help him and he didn't understand what that meant. So I spelled the word out loud and sounded it out as I went. At the end he told me that his brain doesn't work that way- that it's nearly impossible for him to hold the sounds in his head while he tries to spell. I was really quite awestruck by that distinct differences in our brains.
- qq66 5y ago
  You can only "spell it exactly how it sounds" in languages like Italian or Spanish, not in English.
  - lelandfe 5y ago
    "Oaxaca," just like it sounds
    - pessimizer 5y ago
      That's a really good example. Was it supposed to be a bad one? The only glaring exception I run into in Spanish is "que" being pronounced "ke."
      - lelandfe 5y ago
        In my learning, I've definitely found that holdover words with "X" are the strangest relative to what is taught. "Oaxaca" has at least two different pronunciations depending on where you are in Mexico, since the pronunciation has evolved over time. See also: xerez.
        pessimizer 5y ago
        Not the best at Spanish, but it always seems to me that all "x"s drift based on location, not just a few, making it an accent for me rather than an inconsistency. "ll" is the same way.
6510 5y ago
I know a guy who uses whatsapp by clicking on peoples pictures, using voice and video calls and sending audio messages. It doesn't seem like there is a problem.
- B1FF_PSUVM 5y ago
  Nowadays people also use voice-to-text to send SMS / whatever messages ... and car systems don't even let you read messages, they just speak them out. Not to mention all the video-training going on - literacy may be on the diminishing returns path for much of the population these days. However nervous that makes us who are still surfing the last five centuries wave of ever-rising literacy.
MPSimmons 5y ago
Very eye-opening paper. Thanks for posting this. I have never considered most of the things brought up in this. Really good to read.
ravedave5 5y ago
Small sample size, but still very interesting. I was shocked that some people think text should be removed from the UI for them. I would hope the goal would be for them to learn to read and I have to imaging after seeing certain words like "close" or "save" over and over they would get some basic understanding of the shape of the word to help them in new applications or other areas of their life.
httpz 5y ago
It always blows my mind seeing a 4-year-old, who can't even read, navigating YouTube on their parent's phone better than some adults I know with PhDs. Though as a kid I do remember playing RPG games in a language I don't know at all.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- Doxin 5y ago
  I learned English as a kid by trying to read the manual for game maker. I'd sometimes get my parents to translate little bits, but they had better shit to do than sit there and translate line by line. Somehow I managed to bootstrap that into (IMHO) pretty fluent English. Ask me to do something similar today and I am 100% sure it'd be impossible. Little kids are impressive.
brokencode 5y ago
The only illiterate folks I know are my niece and nephew, who are young kids. I don’t know what I thought my 3 year old niece was going to do on her iPad when she asked if I wanted to watch “dog shows” with her, but I was surprised to find out that she knew about the voice to text feature built into iOS and used it to search YouTube. It’s kind of amazing what you can do with just your voice and a determination to watch shows about dogs. :)
- freeflight 5y ago
  > I was surprised to find out that she knew about the voice to text feature built into iOS and used it to search YouTube. That's something I noticed across most of the younger children in my extended family; They all love the Siri's, Alexa's and whatnots. I think it's because such a natural way to interact for children that age, they love talking, and to them there is very real novelty to have this flat, obviously innate, object reply to them in rather human ways while still being able to "tinker" with it by asking it stuff that doesn't result in good responses.
  - jamiek88 5y ago
    Yeah an even the most patient of adult tires of the same question over and over but Siri doesn’t.
recursive 5y ago
My nearly literate 5 year old does pretty well in Kerbal Space Program. He learned how to do this by clicking around for hours and memorizing what happened.
kingcharles 5y ago
I came across large numbers of illiterate people in jail. They would have no problem ordering their commissary even though they could not "read" any of the forms or labels. The illiterate guys were usually the ones who were best at card games though.
ahmed_ds 5y ago
Buttons and prompts, man. Give people one question at a time, get their response asynchronously. The good ol' days were people had phone interactive prompts with number# instead of automated voice options call. People have an intuitive feel for what they want based on the words shown to them, rather than listening and sitting through an automated voice and pressing buttons. Moreover the number# process allowed you to add options (like -2222*2#) that way you could easily go to your desired services. But with more and more AI Voiced Customer Support popping up, I think we are adding more bureaucracy in the promise of efficiency.
mistrial9 5y ago
recent thread on literacy overall https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29734146 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29734146
eric4smith 5y ago
What would be interesting is to see how “low information” people use mobile phones. What apps do they use? How do they use search? Would be fascinating.
iammjm 5y ago
Interesting, my initial reaction to reading the abstract was: why are we thinking about UX instead of investing the money and time in fixing the root cause - illiteracy? But then I thought: It's not that people can't read or write, it's that they often move to new countries and have to deal with a completely new language. So: I guess the solution would be less text, more visuals and symbols. But: are symbols universally understandable? Not all of them for sure, but definitely a portion of them; especially those pertaining to our biology and lowest common denominators as humans. Pointing inwards with a finger at own's open mouth should be an universally understandable symbol for hunger; a pictogram for sun should communicate heat -- but it could also communicate other things such as good fortune, daytime etc. and this is where problems arise: precision suffers, misunderstandings happen. Can we do away with language altogether? I was thinking about starting with the universally understood axiomatic symbols and using them to create more and more complex symbols to achieve precision. But I guess that's exactly what language and math does, even historically starting with cave paintings, through graphic languages and whatnot, increasing abstraction and information density. So this brings me back all the way to the initial problem, with the feeling like I've barely understood anything, not even mentioning a solution...
- kaba0 5y ago
  I remember reading a very interesting paper on how can we make nuclear waste dumps marked as unsafe for 1000s of years. It employed things like surrounding it with sharp, outward pointing dangerous objects, building a maze-like concrete structure around its general area and trying to create universally understandable pictograms to say “stay away”, even for a possible post-nuclear-catastrophe society. Unfortunately I couldn’t find that paper again, but it was really interesting read and you might also find it interesting. Another similar topic that comes to mind is the https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_Golden_Record https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_Golden_Record
  - andrewaylett 5y ago
    The key phase to search for is "this is not a place of honour", and you're looking for https://www.damninteresting.com/this-place-is-not-a-place-of-honor/ https://www.damninteresting.com/this-place-is-not-a-place-of...
euske 5y ago
I feel that the study is dated. Nowadays (at least on iOS) VoiceOver is pretty good: they can read almost all parts of the contents, maps, and even texts on pictures. Not sure how much of it is designed with illiterate people in mind, but wouldn't be surprised if they are. Mobile phones are truly becoming a device of empowerment now.

155 points by kvee 5y ago

> 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.

lotyrin 5y ago
This reminds me of a certain facet of computer literacy: exploration. There are users who will only seek out menu items in software if they already know they are there and where, compared to users who will seek out the items they are looking for and can imagine that they probably do exist somewhere. It's unimaginable to the latter user that one would possibly have to "learn" how to use Google Docs having only ever been exposed to MS Word, while the former is completely lost because the menus have to be re-learned and all the possibilities available to them must be re-memorized.
- imoverclocked 5y ago
  Beautifully put. I've experienced this dichotomy so many times in many different contexts. Being literate and being able to explore are extremely empowering gifts.
- hughrr 5y ago
  I was a contractor once and was basically used as a scapegoat after being asked to move some UI bits for the sake of consistency. This was moving the OK and Cancel buttons on every single dialog window so they were in the same consistent place. The customers shit the bed and the change rolled back and an “unspecified contractor” was blamed for “an unauthorised change”. I chose not to renew that one.
  - BitwiseFool 5y ago
    They should have done them one at a time. You can reasonably gaslight the client that way. I sometimes forget whether or not OK should be on the left or right of Cancel.
    - bcraven 5y ago
      https://help.duo.com/s/article/7231?language=en_US https://help.duo.com/s/article/7231?language=en_US The Duo authentication app recently swapped the 'Accept' and 'Deny' buttons and it was unbelievably frustrating.
    - _dain_ 5y ago
      It's amazing that I use computers all the time and I can't remember what the standard placement of OK/Cancel is, offhand. It's like how nobody can remember which way the Queen faces on a coin.
      - ralfd 5y ago
        Actually that is easy to remember, because OK/Cancel is the wrong Windows way and Cancel/VerbOfAction the enlightened Apple way. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17269938 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17269938 > Windows puts OK first Apple puts OK last Gnome, iOS and Android followed Apples style, which influences Web Apps.
- code_duck 5y ago
  That makes me think of how many times I've had to ask people "what does the error message on the screen say?" or tell my parents "the words that it says on the screen - read them, the program/website is trying to tell you something". When it comes to software many users are functionally illiterate because they don't even try to read alert windows or error messages, assuming that they will be meaningless.
  - ehutch79 5y ago
    THIS. So much this.
  - svachalek 5y ago
    Yup, I've seen this a lot. This type of user basically operates like a script, they move through a memorized list of steps and when they can't go forward they simply throw an exception.
    - tn1 5y ago
      not even really an exception, they're more a like a PHP script that just ignores errors and continues
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
    > they don't even try to read alert windows or error messages, assuming that they will be meaningless I work in IT and I can assure you that software developers have been doing their best for the past 20 years to live up to that expectation.
    - 6510 5y ago
      I'm currently breaking my head trying to fix a "you didn't fill out all fields" error for a form with only hidden fields. I keep thinking how useful the message must be to the user.
  - gknoy 5y ago
    I still recall my father having various error messages from software (browsers, website, Word, etc), and when I'd translate them it was almost always a case of the error message being meaningful to me _but not in those words_, and so when I'd translate them for him he'd ask, "why didn't the error message say THAT?". It still is something I think about occasionally when trying to write logging or error messages -- how we got there, how to fix it, etc.
- newsbinator 5y ago
  Anybody have ideas on why the age divide on expectation + exploration vs. memorization seems so stark? In my experience the top predictor of whether a person can use a computer to do what they intended to do is age. Not IQ, not other mechanical or technical competence, not education, not cultural background, not linguistic aptitude, not reading speed, not creativity, not engineering or product design experience... mainly age. (with outliers of course)
  - OkayPhysicist 5y ago
    My guess is it's about how curious about new things you were when computers got popular. Computers are, compared to a lot of real world devices, a lot more complicated than pretty much any consumer tool that predates them, but also more forgiving. Most consumer appliances before computers had at most a couple of settings, all of which were clearly defined and handed to you. Anything beyond that involved aggressive tinkering that may or may not go well. Computers, on the other hand, have interfaces that are vastly larger than any human brain could hope to contain. So they require exploration. This comes naturally to children, less so to fully matured adults, and is extremely rare in people middle-aged or beyond. So you get a line based on how old they were when they first got their hands on a computer.
  - netsharc 5y ago
    It probably has to do with older people being introduced to computers as big, complicated machines with consequences if you mess up, while younger people were first exposed to computer games as kids and knowing it's possible to undo stuff. Until they end up coding a buggy smart contract and losing 6 figures.
  - IIAOPSW 5y ago
    The thing I've noticed about people on the other side of the divide is this irrational fear that doing anything incorrect, even once, is going to completely brick their device and cost a bunch of money. So they develop these weird superstitions and go through the ritualistic rote-learned menu clicks because exploration doesn't feel safe. I don't know the origin of this attitude.
- MonaroVXR 5y ago
  Relearn everything? I use the Apple, Google and Office Suite interchangeable, you don't need to relearn everything.
lkbm 5y ago
This is no surprise to me. My dad wrote batch files when I was a kid. 98.bat give a list of items numbered 1-15. 3.bat then took you to a games directory wherein 99.bat gave you another numbered list list of 30+ games to choose from. I memorized nearly every number on both menus before I could read.
- jamiek88 5y ago
  Same but for porn.
  - saagarjha 5y ago
    …hopefully not before you learned to read.
_dain_ 5y ago
This is basically how my parents and grandparents navigate computers, despite being perfectly capable of reading. It infuriates me when tech companies just move shit around in the interface for no good reason and I have to teach them how to use it all over again. UI/UX people consistently fail this slice of people by not keeping to a stable interface.

lifeisstillgood 5y ago

Favourite fact of the moment : illiterate humans built the walls of jericho as it was built 2,000 years before writing was invented. Text is a jet fuel for humanity, not a requirement for success. I am only saddened that "we" have let down those 800M by not giving them a basic education

drcross 5y ago
I know someone with very bad dyslexia and it's not that he didn't get a basic education, it's that he can't understand written text or menu items more than one layer deep. He calls if wants to communicate which is very endearing but I also have major misgivings with modern UI paradigms. The "three dashed lines" that you see everywhere are infuriating.
- zdragnar 5y ago
  Do visual icons like the three lines for a menu help or hurt the usability of an application for people with dyslexia? I had assumed iconography was a boon for illiterate people- thinking primarily of symbols on shop signs or a striped barbers pole, for example.
  - justsomehnguy 5y ago
    > Do visual icons like the three lines They hurt usability even for people perfectly capable of reading. Especially when Material fanboy fill everything with whitespace and bans black for the text.

gleenn 5y ago

I was learning Japanese in Tokyo while also working on a small-business accounting app. Japanese accounting is extremely specific, so even for someone enrolled in classes, there was no way I would be learning all those kanji any time soon. I impressed a Japanese co-worker though, because I quickly learned visually where the buttons I needed to click were so I could copy the app features from iPhone to Android. Turns out you don't have to be able to read almost anything as long as you see something used correctly and can remember button locations visually etc.

Beltalowda 5y ago
When I was young I played a lot of Japanese games on the MSX like this: try stuff, see what happens, memorize, repeat as needed. I played through SD Snatcher and some other games like this. Kids can have a lot of patience in a weird way like that. Today I'd probably give up after a few minutes.
- qwertycrackers 5y ago
  When my younger brother was very young (perhaps 5 or 6 years old), he inherited my old Gameboy Color with my copy of Pokemon Crystal, which I had left saved at some random point midway through the game. He, not knowing how to read, never realized that there was such a thing as saves or progress in the game. In his mind, that save point was his "start point", where he would always begin his adventures and the pokemon I had left him with were the only ones he ever used. He loved to run around in the wild battling pokemon and occasionally making very accidental progress away from his "start point". One time, he managed to stumble his way into using Cut to remove a tree and entered a whole new world of things to explore! After a while he become totally lost, and wanting to return to familiar territory he simply restarted the Game Boy and was right back where he knew. We continue to find much humor in the degree to which children can make any random experience a fun adventure.
  - wincy 5y ago
    My daughter loves to play “that spaceship game” (Among Us) despite not knowing how to read. She had great fun running around and looking at everything. She knows how to join lobbies. It’s probably good she doesn’t know how to read as I’d imagine there are a lot of very angry 12 year olds throwing expletives her way for being “bad” at the game.

smackeyacky 5y ago

Funny story from a school teacher: One of the kids she has is determinedly illiterate (7 years old, pretty poor family background) but said kid, after "borrowing" one of the class iPads during lunch hour managed to search up a pile of pornography and got caught. Teachers were somewhat perplexed how this kid who barely manages to write his own name searches up some fairly complicated terms. He did it by simply using the iPad speech recognition system.

Spooky23 5y ago
Suggestion engines are powerful too. When my son was just about 3, he could navigate YouTube from and arbitrary point to Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends or a particular garbage truck video.
- _carbyau_ 5y ago
  This. I've heard stories about kids effectively using the suggestions as a multi link menu system. They open the site, look for one familiar suggestion to start off on, and follow the web from there.
mrtksn 5y ago
Kids can do genius stuff, they are very very open to experimentation and out of the box thinking(as they don't have a box to start with, I guess). I recall someones kid discovering that clicking on ads in games opens the safari within the app, finding their way from there into Google, therefore bypassing the parental restrictions.
teunispeters 5y ago
On a related note, my daughter (grade 1) uses speech recognition to do spell checking and confirm how a word is spelled. Mind, she does complicated words like "imposter" and "infected". (real example, and yes she's found "Among Us" playthrough videos...)

jsherwani 5y ago

My PhD thesis focused on voice interface design for people with limited literacy skills. One of the most surprising discoveries for me was that menus and even lists of items aren’t natural concepts that exist outside of a context of literacy. Even for voice interfaces, a touch tone menu (“for X press 1, for Y press 2...”) was a lot harder to navigate than an equivalent voice-based menu (“would you like X, Y, or Z?”). As a side project during my final year of my thesis research, I wrote an iPhone app that unexpectedly propelled me into the world of entrepreneurship, so I ended up pursuing the startup life after I graduated. But this space is still fascinating to me.

urthor 5y ago
Speech Interfaces for Information Access By Low Literate Users I presume?
thomasz 5y ago
Is it online somewhere?
tpoacher 5y ago
I would also be interested to read your thesis, if you don't mind linking to it :) edit: also, pop looks very nice! congrats!
- _boffin_ 5y ago
  https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~jsherwan/JS-thesis.pdf https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~jsherwan/JS-thesis.pdf
  - jsherwani 5y ago
    Yes, that’s it! An easier and shorter read may be the final paper I published in that domain, which talks more about the difference between literate and low/non-literate users: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~jsherwan/pubs/orality-hcid-itid09.pdf http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~jsherwan/pubs/orality-hcid-itid09.pdf
5y ago

serverlessmom 5y ago

This is really interesting. It reminds me of a conversation I had recently with a friend of mine who struggles a lot with spelling. His first language is English and even so sometimes it is hard to decipher what he means when he messages me. Recently he asked me how to spell something and I said, "You spell it exactly how it sounds," and he told me that doesn't help him and he didn't understand what that meant. So I spelled the word out loud and sounded it out as I went. At the end he told me that his brain doesn't work that way- that it's nearly impossible for him to hold the sounds in his head while he tries to spell. I was really quite awestruck by that distinct differences in our brains.

qq66 5y ago
You can only "spell it exactly how it sounds" in languages like Italian or Spanish, not in English.
- lelandfe 5y ago
  "Oaxaca," just like it sounds
  - pessimizer 5y ago
    That's a really good example. Was it supposed to be a bad one? The only glaring exception I run into in Spanish is "que" being pronounced "ke."
    - lelandfe 5y ago
      In my learning, I've definitely found that holdover words with "X" are the strangest relative to what is taught. "Oaxaca" has at least two different pronunciations depending on where you are in Mexico, since the pronunciation has evolved over time. See also: xerez.
      - pessimizer 5y ago
        Not the best at Spanish, but it always seems to me that all "x"s drift based on location, not just a few, making it an accent for me rather than an inconsistency. "ll" is the same way.

6510 5y ago

I know a guy who uses whatsapp by clicking on peoples pictures, using voice and video calls and sending audio messages. It doesn't seem like there is a problem.

B1FF_PSUVM 5y ago
Nowadays people also use voice-to-text to send SMS / whatever messages ... and car systems don't even let you read messages, they just speak them out. Not to mention all the video-training going on - literacy may be on the diminishing returns path for much of the population these days. However nervous that makes us who are still surfing the last five centuries wave of ever-rising literacy.

MPSimmons 5y ago

Very eye-opening paper. Thanks for posting this. I have never considered most of the things brought up in this. Really good to read.

ravedave5 5y ago

Small sample size, but still very interesting. I was shocked that some people think text should be removed from the UI for them. I would hope the goal would be for them to learn to read and I have to imaging after seeing certain words like "close" or "save" over and over they would get some basic understanding of the shape of the word to help them in new applications or other areas of their life.

httpz 5y ago

It always blows my mind seeing a 4-year-old, who can't even read, navigating YouTube on their parent's phone better than some adults I know with PhDs. Though as a kid I do remember playing RPG games in a language I don't know at all.

deleted 5y ago
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Doxin 5y ago
I learned English as a kid by trying to read the manual for game maker. I'd sometimes get my parents to translate little bits, but they had better shit to do than sit there and translate line by line. Somehow I managed to bootstrap that into (IMHO) pretty fluent English. Ask me to do something similar today and I am 100% sure it'd be impossible. Little kids are impressive.

brokencode 5y ago

The only illiterate folks I know are my niece and nephew, who are young kids. I don’t know what I thought my 3 year old niece was going to do on her iPad when she asked if I wanted to watch “dog shows” with her, but I was surprised to find out that she knew about the voice to text feature built into iOS and used it to search YouTube. It’s kind of amazing what you can do with just your voice and a determination to watch shows about dogs. :)

freeflight 5y ago
> I was surprised to find out that she knew about the voice to text feature built into iOS and used it to search YouTube. That's something I noticed across most of the younger children in my extended family; They all love the Siri's, Alexa's and whatnots. I think it's because such a natural way to interact for children that age, they love talking, and to them there is very real novelty to have this flat, obviously innate, object reply to them in rather human ways while still being able to "tinker" with it by asking it stuff that doesn't result in good responses.
- jamiek88 5y ago
  Yeah an even the most patient of adult tires of the same question over and over but Siri doesn’t.

recursive 5y ago

My nearly literate 5 year old does pretty well in Kerbal Space Program. He learned how to do this by clicking around for hours and memorizing what happened.

kingcharles 5y ago

I came across large numbers of illiterate people in jail. They would have no problem ordering their commissary even though they could not "read" any of the forms or labels. The illiterate guys were usually the ones who were best at card games though.

ahmed_ds 5y ago

Buttons and prompts, man. Give people one question at a time, get their response asynchronously. The good ol' days were people had phone interactive prompts with number# instead of automated voice options call. People have an intuitive feel for what they want based on the words shown to them, rather than listening and sitting through an automated voice and pressing buttons. Moreover the number# process allowed you to add options (like -2222*2#) that way you could easily go to your desired services. But with more and more AI Voiced Customer Support popping up, I think we are adding more bureaucracy in the promise of efficiency.

mistrial9 5y ago

recent thread on literacy overall https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29734146 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29734146

eric4smith 5y ago

What would be interesting is to see how “low information” people use mobile phones. What apps do they use? How do they use search? Would be fascinating.

iammjm 5y ago

Interesting, my initial reaction to reading the abstract was: why are we thinking about UX instead of investing the money and time in fixing the root cause - illiteracy? But then I thought: It's not that people can't read or write, it's that they often move to new countries and have to deal with a completely new language. So: I guess the solution would be less text, more visuals and symbols. But: are symbols universally understandable? Not all of them for sure, but definitely a portion of them; especially those pertaining to our biology and lowest common denominators as humans. Pointing inwards with a finger at own's open mouth should be an universally understandable symbol for hunger; a pictogram for sun should communicate heat -- but it could also communicate other things such as good fortune, daytime etc. and this is where problems arise: precision suffers, misunderstandings happen. Can we do away with language altogether? I was thinking about starting with the universally understood axiomatic symbols and using them to create more and more complex symbols to achieve precision. But I guess that's exactly what language and math does, even historically starting with cave paintings, through graphic languages and whatnot, increasing abstraction and information density. So this brings me back all the way to the initial problem, with the feeling like I've barely understood anything, not even mentioning a solution...

kaba0 5y ago
I remember reading a very interesting paper on how can we make nuclear waste dumps marked as unsafe for 1000s of years. It employed things like surrounding it with sharp, outward pointing dangerous objects, building a maze-like concrete structure around its general area and trying to create universally understandable pictograms to say “stay away”, even for a possible post-nuclear-catastrophe society. Unfortunately I couldn’t find that paper again, but it was really interesting read and you might also find it interesting. Another similar topic that comes to mind is the https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_Golden_Record https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_Golden_Record
- andrewaylett 5y ago
  The key phase to search for is "this is not a place of honour", and you're looking for https://www.damninteresting.com/this-place-is-not-a-place-of-honor/ https://www.damninteresting.com/this-place-is-not-a-place-of...

euske 5y ago

I feel that the study is dated. Nowadays (at least on iOS) VoiceOver is pretty good: they can read almost all parts of the contents, maps, and even texts on pictures. Not sure how much of it is designed with illiterate people in mind, but wouldn't be surprised if they are. Mobile phones are truly becoming a device of empowerment now.