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Mobile interface design for low-literacy populations

Published: 28 January 2012 Publication History

Abstract

Despite the proliferation of mobile health applications, few target low literacy users. This is a matter of concern because 43% of the United States population is functionally illiterate. To empower everyone to be a full participant in the evolving health system and prevent further disparities, we must understand the design needs of low literacy populations. In this paper, we present two complementary studies of four graphical user interface (GUI) widgets and three different cross-page navigation styles in mobile applications with a varying literacy, chronically-ill population. Participant's navigation and interaction styles were documented while they performed search tasks using high fidelity prototypes running on a mobile device. Results indicate that participants could use any non-text based GUI widgets. For navigation structures, users performed best when navigating a linear structure, but preferred the features of cross-linked navigation. Based on these findings, we provide some recommendations for designing accessible mobile applications for varying-literacy populations.

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cover image ACM Conferences
IHI '12: Proceedings of the 2nd ACM SIGHIT International Health Informatics Symposium
January 2012
914 pages
ISBN:9781450307819
DOI:10.1145/2110363
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 28 January 2012

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Author Tags

  1. interface design
  2. low-literacy
  3. mobile
  4. navigation style
  5. widget

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IHI '12
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IHI '12: ACM International Health Informatics Symposium
January 28 - 30, 2012
Florida, Miami, USA

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  • (2024)EvolveUI: User Interfaces that Evolve with User ProficiencyProceedings of the 7th ACM SIGCAS/SIGCHI Conference on Computing and Sustainable Societies10.1145/3674829.3675078(230-237)Online publication date: 8-Jul-2024
  • (2024)"If it is easy to understand then it will have value": Examining Perceptions of Explainable AI with Community Health Workers in Rural IndiaProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36373488:CSCW1(1-28)Online publication date: 26-Apr-2024
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