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

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.