The talking book: participatory design of an icon-based user interface for rural people with low literacy

The Talking Book is an audio technology for sharing knowledge about health and agriculture among oral cultures in rural settings. As a technology, without a display or mouse; navigation is through audio instructions and buttons labelled with icons. This paper presents the iterative Participatory Design (PD) approach employed in redesigning the iconography of the User Interface (UI). We found that the PD process created a feeling among users of ownership and acceptance of the technology as their own creation. For users, the most suitable icons are not those that denote any function, but those that are simply recognizable, which led to replacing international icons such as arrows, with icons representing local objects such as bowls, trees, and hands. An extensive evaluation showed that the new UI was more user-friendly and better liked. This work contributes a novel interface and highlights the value and the challenges of including users who are less familiar with technology in design.