As user experience practitioners we are challenged to create innovative designs and engaging experiences.
Through the design and development process we take great measures to ensure our products, web sites, and applications are accessible. What disabilities and impairments do we account for in our design? In the developed world, what assumptions do we make about our users? Is it fair to say that we assume, and therefore design for a certain, minimum level of literacy? If this is the case, what happens to the people on the margins of this presupposed level of literacy? How do people with low to no literacy manage to use mobile devices, for example, which are designed with primarily text-based interfaces?
Mobile phone use is prolific through the developed and the developing world, where literacy levels vary greatly from densely populated urban areas to sparsely inhabited rural villages. Despite the fact that a large number of users around the world are unable to read the text-based interfaces on their mobile phones, which were clearly not designed with them in mind, they continue to use them. Not only are low to no literacy populations using mobile devices, they are using them in ways the designers of these products never imagined. They are coming up with innovative and creative work-arounds to make the device work for them– to do the things that they need the device to do for them, in their specific context.
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