A student of design, Indrani Medhi has developed a design process to expand the impact of technology to those who can't read. She has developed text-free user interfaces (UIs). These are design guidelines that would allow any first-time illiterate person, on first contact with a computer, to immediately realize useful interaction with minimal or no assistance. "Through an ethnographic design process involving more than 400 subjects from low-income, low-literate communities across India, the Philippines, and South Africa, I discovered that there were a number of usability challenges which people experienced while interacting with traditional text-based UIs, on both mobile phones and PCs. In addition to the general inability to read text, the other major challenge was the difficulty in navigating hierar- chical menus in current information architectures. I developed design recommendations for non-textual UIs for low-literate users that use combinations of voice, video, and graphics," says Medhi.
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