Non-Literacy as a Barrier to Mobile Phone Communication
It’s well known that as the Western and Asian markets become saturated with phones, the main growth areas will be the emerging markets which have higher numbers of textually non-literate people. Nokia has an excellent study on this.
To gain an appreciation of the problems, try the Nokia Simple Non-Literacy Test…
"If you’re wondering just how hard it is for a non-literate person to use a mobile phone? Change the language setting on your phone to one you don’t understand for a day and see how well you manage."
The Nokia study says…
"Our hypothesis is that once the non-literate user has learned how to make and receive phone calls to their close circle of contacts, their primary reason for owning a mobile phone has largely been met. There is, therefore, less motivation to spend additional time rote learning other features on the phone, unless someone can proactively demonstrate the worth of the features, and spends the time to teach them the steps required to complete the task…
…Two features of mobile phones that many users take for granted - text messaging and contact management - present significant but not insurmountable hurdles for textually non-literate users."
For developers such as myself, this has significant implications. If future growth in users (and services/applications) depends on emerging markets, it’s going to be very difficult to expect advanced mobile services to easily scale to such markets where non-literacy is common. Seems obvious, in hindsight, I suppose.