Non-literacy Mobiles

Report

A Nokia Research Center study, ‘Understanding Non-Literacy as a Barrier to Mobile Phone Communication’, examining how textually non-literate users in emerging markets such as India and China navigate mobile phones designed around text-based prompts. Based on ethnographic user research, the study finds contact management and asynchronous communication particularly challenging for non-literate users, and proposes solutions spanning improvements to the phone itself, the wider app and content ecosystem, and operator infrastructure, as handset makers increasingly target growth in populous, lower-literacy emerging markets.