Usage of the memory of mobile phones by illiterate people

Abstract

A large number of illiterate people all around the world is using mobile phones for serving different purposes of their day-to-day life. Since most of the operations in a typical mobile phone require a minimum level of literacy, it has become interesting to know how these illiterate people manage to operate these phones. Understanding this usage pattern would help us design an effective user interface for these people. At the same time, it would help us understand the human learning behavior while interacting with a technical artifact. In this short communication, we present the initial findings of our ongoing project on investigating many of the questions related to this issue. Here we try to get an idea of how illiterate people use the memory of mobile phones. We present here our initial findings from our investigation upon 15 illiterate mobile phone users in Bangladesh. This study revealed a number of interesting facts about how illiterate people "unbox" mobile technology.