Some Evidence for the Impact of Limited Education on Hierarchical User Interface Navigation

One of the greatest challenges in designing applications for economically poor communities is that potential users may have little or no education. We investigated how limited education appears to impact the ability to navigate a hierarchical UI, even when it has no text. Our results confirm that textual literacy is correlated with scores on the Raven’s test. In addition, we found that performance on both instruments are predictive of performance in navigating UI hierarchies, even when the UI is text-free. This provides statistically significant confirmation of previous anecdotal hypotheses. We conclude with design recommendations for UI hierarchies for people with limited education.