Actionable UI Design Guidelines for Smartphone Applications Inclusive of Low-Literate Users

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With easy access to affordable internet-powered smartphones, developing countries are adopting smartphone applications to provide enabling services to its citizens, including eHealth, eGovernance, and digital payments. The challenge is to ensure equitable access to these services by everyone, including people with semi-literacy or low-literacy who form a large part of the population in developing nations. However, extensive HCI literature has identified literacy as one of the barriers to designing user interfaces. In this work, we propose a framework of actionable guidelines for designing smartphone UIs that would be usable by low-literate users. We reviewed the last two decades of HCI literature engaging people with low literacy, to synthesize our framework. To evaluate the framework, we did a preliminary study with a group of 20 practitioners and researchers working in the field of UI/UX/HCI. We also analyzed six publicly available industry reports on designing UIs for people with low-literacy. The proposed guidelines intend to support researchers, practitioners, designers, and implementers in the design and evaluation of UIs of smartphone applications for people with low literacy. We present the evolutionary nature of the proposed framework while highlighting the importance of adopting a translational approach when building such frameworks.