[HN Gopher] Text is not the enemy: How illiterates use their mob... ___________________________________________________________________ Text is not the enemy: How illiterates use their mobile phones Author : kvee Score : 69 points Date : 2022-02-10 20:41 UTC (2 hours ago) (HTM) web link (www.researchgate.net) (TXT) w3m dump (www.researchgate.net) | MPSimmons wrote: | Very eye-opening paper. Thanks for posting this. I have never | considered most of the things brought up in this. Really good to | read. | newsbinator wrote: | > The speed at which they traversed the phone menus was the same | as for literate people. We often had to ask our interviewees to | slow down when they were showing us how they performed certain | tasks on their phones. They mastered important functionality | through rote learning: "After I have clicked on this icon I need | to go down twice and then - click! - I'm done." This was the same | technique that they used to learn how to operate other important | digital interfaces such as ATMs and game consoles. Family or | friends assisted during the memorization phase and they repeated | the procedures in their presence as many times as needed. | lotyrin wrote: | This reminds me of a certain facet of computer literacy: | exploration. There are users who will only seek out menu items | in software if they already know they are there and where, | compared to users who will seek out the items they are looking | for and can imagine that they probably do exist somewhere. | | It's unimaginable to the latter user that one would possibly | have to "learn" how to use Google Docs having only ever been | exposed to MS Word, while the former is completely lost because | the menus have to be re-learned and all the possibilities | available to them must be re-memorized. | hughrr wrote: | I was a contractor once and was basically used as a scapegoat | after being asked to move some UI bits for the sake of | consistency. This was moving the OK and Cancel buttons on | every single dialog window so they were in the same | consistent place. | | The customers shit the bed and the change rolled back and an | "unspecified contractor" was blamed for "an unauthorised | change". | | I chose not to renew that one. | BitwiseFool wrote: | They should have done them one at a time. You can | reasonably gaslight the client that way. I sometimes forget | whether or not OK should be on the left or right of Cancel. | bcraven wrote: | https://help.duo.com/s/article/7231?language=en_US | | The Duo authentication app recently swapped the 'Accept' | and 'Deny' buttons and it was unbelievably frustrating. | newsbinator wrote: | Anybody have ideas on why the age divide on expectation + | exploration vs. memorization seems so stark? | | In my experience the top predictor of whether a person can | use a computer to do what they intended to do is age. Not IQ, | not other mechanical or technical competence, not education, | not cultural background, not linguistic aptitude, not reading | speed, not creativity, not engineering or product design | experience... mainly age. | | (with outliers of course) | OkayPhysicist wrote: | My guess is it's about how curious about new things you | were when computers got popular. Computers are, compared to | a lot of real world devices, a lot more complicated than | pretty much any consumer tool that predates them, but also | more forgiving. Most consumer appliances before computers | had at most a couple of settings, all of which were clearly | defined and handed to you. Anything beyond that involved | aggressive tinkering that may or may not go well. | | Computers, on the other hand, have interfaces that are | vastly larger than any human brain could hope to contain. | So they require exploration. This comes naturally to | children, less so to fully matured adults, and is extremely | rare in people middle-aged or beyond. So you get a line | based on how old they were when they first got their hands | on a computer. | code_duck wrote: | That makes me think of how many times I've had to ask people | "what does the error message on the screen say?" or tell my | parents "the words that it says on the screen - read them, | the program/website is trying to tell you something". When it | comes to software many users are functionally illiterate | because they don't even try to read alert windows or error | messages, assuming that they will be meaningless. | ehutch79 wrote: | THIS. | | So much this. | svachalek wrote: | Yup, I've seen this a lot. This type of user basically | operates like a script, they move through a memorized list | of steps and when they can't go forward they simply throw | an exception. | tn1 wrote: | not even really an exception, they're more a like a PHP | script that just ignores errors and continues | wyattpeak wrote: | I've made that gripe too, but there's something about error | messages though that makes them very hard to take in. I | don't know why, but I debug crap for a living, and I still | every now and then find myself searching for a bug in | Google, only to realise that there are instructions for | resolving it in the error message. | | I can't quite put my finger on why I can't adapt. It's some | combination of the facts that 1) there's often a huge dump | of information, much of it so technical that it's useful | only to the developers, 2) it's fairly rare that it offers | a truly useful suggestion, and 3) many of the messages I | encounter ask me to do something that makes things easy for | the developer rather than the user (update the software, | contact the manufacturer). | | I think it's something we as an industry ought to work | harder on, because I don't think the failure is only in the | users. I think, although I can't explain exactly why, we're | communicating very poorly. | AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: | > they don't even try to read alert windows or error | messages, assuming that they will be meaningless | | I work in IT and I can assure you that software developers | have been doing their best for the past 20 years to live up | to that expectation. | 6510 wrote: | I'm currently breaking my head trying to fix a "you | didn't fill out all fields" error for a form with only | hidden fields. I keep thinking how useful the message | must be to the user. | gknoy wrote: | I still recall my father having various error messages from | software (browsers, website, Word, etc), and when I'd | translate them it was almost always a case of the error | message being meaningful to me _but not in those words_, | and so when I'd translate them for him he'd ask, "why | didn't the error message say THAT?". It still is something | I think about occasionally when trying to write logging or | error messages -- how we got there, how to fix it, etc. | imoverclocked wrote: | Beautifully put. I've experienced this dichotomy so many | times in many different contexts. Being literate and being | able to explore are extremely empowering gifts. | lkbm wrote: | This is no surprise to me. | | My dad wrote batch files when I was a kid. 98.bat give a list | of items numbered 1-15. 3.bat then took you to a games | directory wherein 99.bat gave you another numbered list list of | 30+ games to choose from. | | I memorized nearly every number on both menus before I could | read. | gleenn wrote: | I was learning Japanese in Tokyo while also working on a small- | business accounting app. Japanese accounting is extremely | specific, so even for someone enrolled in classes, there was no | way I would be learning all those kanji any time soon. I | impressed a Japanese co-worker though, because I quickly learned | visually where the buttons I needed to click were so I could copy | the app features from iPhone to Android. Turns out you don't have | to be able to read almost anything as long as you see something | used correctly and can remember button locations visually etc. | PaulHoule wrote: | Chinese characters are hard to learn even if you are Chinese. | Places that use them have high illiteracy rates but many people | learn how to "fake it". | gibolt wrote: | This is very much untrue. Writing with a pen, maybe. Rare, | obscure characters from ancient texts, sure. Basic daily-use | characters are understandable to even most of the elderly in | super remote villages. | Beltalowda wrote: | When I was young I played a lot of Japanese games on the MSX | like this: try stuff, see what happens, memorize, repeat as | needed. I played through SD Snatcher and some other games like | this. | | Kids can have a lot of patience in a weird way like that. Today | I'd probably give up after a few minutes. | qwertycrackers wrote: | When my younger brother was very young (perhaps 5 or 6 years | old), he inherited my old Gameboy Color with my copy of | Pokemon Crystal, which I had left saved at some random point | midway through the game. He, not knowing how to read, never | realized that there was such a thing as saves or progress in | the game. In his mind, that save point was his "start point", | where he would always begin his adventures and the pokemon I | had left him with were the only ones he ever used. He loved | to run around in the wild battling pokemon and occasionally | making very accidental progress away from his "start point". | | One time, he managed to stumble his way into using Cut to | remove a tree and entered a whole new world of things to | explore! After a while he become totally lost, and wanting to | return to familiar territory he simply restarted the Game Boy | and was right back where he knew. We continue to find much | humor in the degree to which children can make any random | experience a fun adventure. | wincy wrote: | My daughter loves to play "that spaceship game" (Among Us) | despite not knowing how to read. She had great fun running | around and looking at everything. She knows how to join | lobbies. It's probably good she doesn't know how to read as | I'd imagine there are a lot of very angry 12 year olds | throwing expletives her way for being "bad" at the game. | mgarciaisaia wrote: | Japanese was something we Argentinians really didn't know back | in the 90's when I was a kid (we still don't usually know it, | but now I know some people who are picking up classes). | | But then there was Captain Tsubasa's FamiCom game, which some | friends had, only in Japanese - and it amazed me how easily | they went through all of the menus to change whatever settings | they wanted. | | Kids, spare time, the desire to play some videogames, and a | country whose market wasn't that attractive - an awesome | combination. | wccrawford wrote: | I worked at Office Depot for a while, and Chinese couple | brought in their laptop with a problem. OD didn't do repairs, | but I had worked at a Gateway 2000 call center and a local | computer shop, so I knew my way around. | | Their computer was completely in Chinese, but that didn't stop | me from just quickly clicking through to the control panel and | fixing the problem. | | They were practically slack-jawed staring at me, and then | asked, "Do you speak Chinese?" I told them I just know where | the buttons are. :D | | It was experiences like that (helping a customer beyond what | the store supported, in extreme situations) that make me miss | retail sometimes. All the BS makes sure I don't go back. | gtm1260 wrote: | This reminded me why I loved my retail job, but I think its | partially because I was retail inside an amusement park: I | missed out on most of the BS (people were generally very | happy to be there/ having a great day). | crooked-v wrote: | From that I find myself assuming it was one of the smaller | parks, to avoid the "people going insane over wringing | every last bit of 'fun' out of an incredibly expensive | vacation" problem. | ravedave5 wrote: | Small sample size, but still very interesting. I was shocked that | some people think text should be removed from the UI for them. I | would hope the goal would be for them to learn to read and I have | to imaging after seeing certain words like "close" or "save" over | and over they would get some basic understanding of the shape of | the word to help them in new applications or other areas of their | life. | httpz wrote: | It always blows my mind seeing a 4-year-old, who can't even read, | navigating YouTube on their parent's phone better than some | adults I know with PhDs. | | Though as a kid I do remember playing RPG games in a language I | don't know at all. | [deleted] | jsherwani wrote: | My PhD thesis focused on voice interface design for people with | limited literacy skills. One of the most surprising discoveries | for me was that menus and even lists of items aren't natural | concepts that exist outside of a context of literacy. Even for | voice interfaces, a touch tone menu ("for X press 1, for Y press | 2...") was a lot harder to navigate than an equivalent voice- | based menu ("would you like X, Y, or Z?"). As a side project | during my final year of my thesis research, I wrote an iPhone app | that unexpectedly propelled me into the world of | entrepreneurship, so I ended up pursuing the startup life after I | graduated. But this space is still fascinating to me. | thomasz wrote: | Is it online somewhere? | urthor wrote: | Speech Interfaces for Information Access By Low Literate Users | I presume? | tpoacher wrote: | I would also be interested to read your thesis, if you don't | mind linking to it :) | lifeisstillgood wrote: | Favourite fact of the moment : illiterate humans built the walls | of jericho as it was built 2,000 years before writing was | invented. | | Text is a jet fuel for humanity, not a requirement for success. I | am only saddened that "we" have let down those 800M by not giving | them a basic education | drcross wrote: | I know someone with very bad dyslexia and it's not that he | didn't get a basic education, it's that he can't understand | written text or menu items more than one layer deep. He calls | if wants to communicate which is very endearing but I also have | major misgivings with modern UI paradigms. The "three dashed | lines" that you see everywhere are infuriating. | zdragnar wrote: | Do visual icons like the three lines for a menu help or hurt | the usability of an application for people with dyslexia? | | I had assumed iconography was a boon for illiterate people- | thinking primarily of symbols on shop signs or a striped | barbers pole, for example. | serverlessmom wrote: | This is really interesting. It reminds me of a conversation I had | recently with a friend of mine who struggles a lot with spelling. | His first language is English and even so sometimes it is hard to | decipher what he means when he messages me. Recently he asked me | how to spell something and I said, "You spell it exactly how it | sounds," and he told me that doesn't help him and he didn't | understand what that meant. So I spelled the word out loud and | sounded it out as I went. At the end he told me that his brain | doesn't work that way- that it's nearly impossible for him to | hold the sounds in his head while he tries to spell. I was really | quite awestruck by that distinct differences in our brains. | pwdisswordfish9 wrote: | I can't blame him, English has a pretty irregular spelling. | garrickvanburen wrote: | English mostly isn't. | steinjones wrote: | "You spell it exactly how it sounds" such a bullshit advice | when the language in the context is English, which one-to-one | letter-phoneme correspondence is hilariously bad. | tshaddox wrote: | Well, that's the point. You tell someone to spell it exactly | how it sounds if it _is_ one of the words that is spelled | phonetically. | monkeybutton wrote: | This reminds me of a coworker who recently immigrated from | Brazil asking about the pronunciations of some English words | and being astonished that we don't just use accents to | differentiate it. Like, just use accents. No more ambiguity | and problem solved. | bdamm wrote: | Right? Though the march of enlightenment is eternal, suffrage | is not bourne but rather embraced. Through bright corridors | stream draughts of fairies, otherworldly. | | Phonetics lies, asunder. | ruined wrote: | *borne | | *faeries | demadog wrote: | What is that quote from? Google comes up blank. | wincy wrote: | My wife can't spell and I just tell her "hey just memorize how | to spell everything". I'm convinced that's what we all actually | do, at least with English. | duncan-donuts wrote: | I know this is common but I constantly mispronounce words | phonetically in my head so I remember how to spell them. | qq66 wrote: | You can only "spell it exactly how it sounds" in languages like | Italian or Spanish, not in English. | lelandfe wrote: | "Oaxaca," just like it sounds | buu700 wrote: | That's interesting. Sounds like he may have auditory aphantasia | (which I only know is a thing because of the few times it's | come up on HN lately). | smackeyacky wrote: | Funny story from a school teacher: | | One of the kids she has is determinedly illiterate (7 years old, | pretty poor family background) but said kid, after "borrowing" | one of the class iPads during lunch hour managed to search up a | pile of pornography and got caught. | | Teachers were somewhat perplexed how this kid who barely manages | to write his own name searches up some fairly complicated terms. | He did it by simply using the iPad speech recognition system. | mrtksn wrote: | Kids can do genius stuff, they are very very open to | experimentation and out of the box thinking(as they don't have | a box to start with, I guess). | | I recall someones kid discovering that clicking on ads in games | opens the safari within the app, finding their way from there | into Google, therefore bypassing the parental restrictions. | Spooky23 wrote: | Suggestion engines are powerful too. When my son was just about | 3, he could navigate YouTube from and arbitrary point to | Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends or a particular garbage | truck video. | teunispeters wrote: | On a related note, my daughter (grade 1) uses speech | recognition to do spell checking and confirm how a word is | spelled. Mind, she does complicated words like "imposter" and | "infected". | | (real example, and yes she's found "Among Us" playthrough | videos...) | 6510 wrote: | I know a guy who uses whatsapp by clicking on peoples pictures, | using voice and video calls and sending audio messages. It | doesn't seem like there is a problem. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-02-10 23:00 UTC)