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Literacy, Communication, Design Presentation

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The slides from last week's UIAH presentation on designing for illterate users can now be downloaded from here [6MB]. The presentation draws a lot of its material from this essay on research into illiterate communication practices that weve been doing.

A synopsis? Don't frame the question by 'designing for illiterate people', think about the skills that are necessary to use the core features on a device - something which we term device competency. Consider the different types of literacy that users do have. To what extent do risks & consequences affect device exploration? Why iconic support and voice prompts can be part of a solution but are far from being the solution - instead look to a range of solutions on the device, on the network, and in user's ecosytem. The eco-system can be anything from (task or device) literacy classes to posters on walls. Last but certainly not least that it is better to solve the problem (illiteracy), than design work-around solutions for dealing with the problem (illiterate users stumped by text driven device interfaces).

Why should you be interested designing for illterate people? For selfish reasons of course - illiterate people make excellent lead users - solutions that meets their needs may well point the way to ease of use for the rest of us. I'm sure you can think of other reasons too.

The download is a somewhat condensed version of the original presentation. One slide I removed plays the devil's advocate - that textual literacy is itself a work-around for other forms of communication. At what point does human kind evolve to the point where literacy as we know it becomes redundant? A topic for another day perhaps.

Thank-you to Teemu Leinonen and Andrea Botero Cabrera for hosting the session, Media Lab students for posing questions worth answering and a lively discussion and of course to the extensive team of colleagues who made it all happen (slide 2 of the presentation since you ask).

Related illteracy research here, related presentations here. To be sent notification of new Future Perfect publications, presentations and presentation downloads send an email to info @ janchipchase dot com with the word 'subscribe' in the subject line.

Writing from Tokyo | September 20, 2006 | Permalink