Media player for Semi-illiterate users

Abstract

There are almost 100 million cell phone users in India [8], out of which very few cell phones support languages other than English. People who can hardly read English, use English as the default language in their cell phones. Almost every cell phone user from different age groups uses media player for various purposes. This case study describes challenges faced by users and the approaches they take to overcome them while using the media player. In this study, we selected users with educational level of standard 8 or below and who had not formally learnt English language. We focused on the age group of 35-55 years, because we found that people in this age group faced more difficulties. We conducted contextual inquiries with 38 users with equal number of males and females. Considering the challenges and requirements of various age groups, we developed a prototype in Marathi, which was tested with different sets of users. We found that people responded better to Marathi than English.