How can you create accessible experiences for users with low literacy or language barriers using prototyping?

First, study your users, understand how they navigate interfaces, what they deem challenging and what not. Adhere to best practices that enhance readability and reduce cognitive load. This way, users will be able to comprehend messages without feeling overwhelmed. Use plain language, keep sentences short and concise, and break up text often. Support written information with visual cues such as icons, images, and illustrations. Organise information logically and consider familiar navigation patterns for consistency. Remember to include descriptive alt text for images or icons to accommodate users who rely on screen readers. Utilise colours to convey meaning more effectively, as they can enhance understanding.

Employ various research methods like interviews, surveys, observations, or personas to gain insights into your users' perspectives and experiences. Cultivate empathy and steer clear of making assumptions or resorting to stereotypes. Acknowledge the diversity within your target audience, recognizing that individuals with low literacy or language barriers may possess distinct preferences, skills, and backgrounds. This user-centric approach lays the foundation for designing experiences that cater to a broad range of needs.

Prototyping can be a powerful tool to create accessible experiences for users with low literacy or language barriers. Here are some key strategies: 1. Prioritize Clarity and Simplicity 2. Focus on Non-textual Interactions 3. Emphasize Error Prevention and Feedback 4. Test with Diverse Users

Don't reinvent the wheel. Study what your users are already familiar with, use that as a base. Build and test to keep a track of your progress direction.

Understand the User Base: Conduct research to understand the specific needs of users with low literacy or language barriers. Simplify Language and Visuals: Use clear language in your prototypes. Utilize easily understandable visual elements to convey information. Multilingual Support: Provide support for multiple languages to allow users to choose their preferred language. User Testing: Conduct usability testing with individuals who have low literacy or language barriers. Note how they interact with the prototype and gather feedback on areas that needs improvement. Iterate your prototype based on user testing results to enhance its accessibility.

Start by defining the problems explicitly. Dive into user research, identifying pain points through interviews and usability testing. This hands-on approach ensures a deep understanding of the challenges faced by our diverse user base. Once problems are defined, prototype with empathy. Tools like InVision or Axure can help simulate experiences tailored for different literacy levels. Leverage visual cues, intuitive icons, and straightforward language. By aligning prototyping with the needs of users facing language barriers, we ensure our designs are inclusive and universally understood.

To make digital tools and platforms more accessible, consider using inclusive and plain language, providing alternative formats, ensuring compatibility and responsiveness, and learning from successful examples. These strategies can help users with disabilities, language barriers, or other challenges access online services, applications, or devices more easily.

Defining a user-focused problem is crucial, using tools like problem statements and 'how might we' questions. Ensure the problem is specific, achievable, and time-bound, while the solution should be user-centered, feasible, and viable. Align your solution with accessibility principles like perceivability and understandability for effectiveness.

WHY THIS STEP IS NECESSARY??? 1. Focused Direction: unites the team around a shared objective. 2. User-Centric Design: Articulating the problem in user language raises the possibility of resonance solutions. 3.Measurable Objectives: Detailed standards establish standards for impartial project assessment. 4.Viable Solutions: Clearly stated challenges facilitate the development of technically sound, user-friendly solutions. To summarise, a well-defined problem is crucial for guiding the design process, guaranteeing a user-centric focus, feasibility, alignment with accessibility principles, quantifiable outcomes, and the creation of workable solutions.

Um echte Probleme anzugehen, beginne ich mit einer gründlichen Anforderungsanalyse. Es ist entscheidend, das zu l?sende Problem klar zu definieren und dabei Werkzeuge wie "Wie-k?nnten-wir-Fragen" zu nutzen. Ziel ist eine spezifische, messbare und erreichbare L?sung, die Nutzerbedürfnisse erfüllt und sich nahtlos in die Prinzipien der Barrierefreiheit einfügt. So entstehen keine Luftschl?sser, sondern praktische, benutzerzentrierte L?sungen.

It’s much better to involve users & translators early in this stage. - Brainstorm with visuals: mind maps, sketches, role-playing. Prototype with low-fi materials: paper, cardboard, even play toys! - Prioritize intuitive interactions: gestures, touch, drag & drop. - Embrace non-textual elements: icons, images, audio instructions.

Mind Mapping: This technique helps in visually organising thoughts, linking concepts, and fostering creative thinking. It's particularly useful for capturing a broad range of ideas. Sketching: Rapid sketching allows for quick visualization of ideas. It's an effective way to convey concepts that are difficult to describe verbally and can spur further creative thinking. Ideation Sessions: Conducting brainstorming sessions with your team, where you collectively explore and discuss potential ideas, can yield a diversity of perspectives. The goal at this stage is to generate a wide range of ideas without immediate filtering. This phase is about exploration and creativity, with a focus on understanding the diverse needs of your users.

Simplify the interface and interaction design: Organize layout effectively: Use hierarchical structures, white space, and clear visual distinctions to prioritize information and guide users through the experience. Keep interactions simple and predictable: Reduce reliance on complex gestures and multiple clicks. Ensure keyboard navigation and assistive technology compatibility. Minimize cognitive load: Avoid overwhelming users with too much information or choices at once.

What could be a useful pointer on this topic is to not create an article like this with such complicated and lengthy title that creates barriers for casual readers.

Brainstorming ideas for solutions involves techniques like mind mapping and sketching, focusing on exploring numerous possibilities without immediate judgment. Involving users through co-design or participatory methods provides valuable insights, making the ideation process more inclusive and user-focused.

When creating prototypes, substitute or supplement textual information with easily identifiable icons. Use symbols to express actions or concepts, which will make the interface more intuitive and understandable. Use simple, commonly understood language. If text is required, supply it in many languages or with visual representations. Clearly illustrate users their progress through a process. This can be accomplished via progress bars, step counters, or other visual cues that enhance understanding of the interface.

Illustrate the actions. Giving the users the opportunity to see what’s needs to be done can help their process of understanding.

Information doesn't always have to be communicated via words. There are many ways using the postioning, layouts, icons, functions to convey meaning. Even with users with low literacy or language barriers, there should be ways when you're prototyping to design the interactions to convey the goal.

Imagine you're building a toy castle. First, you draw a simple picture (low-fidelity) to plan how it should look. As you get better ideas, you make a fancier drawing (high-fidelity). Making sure everyone can play with the castle, you also think about using colors and shapes that are easy for everyone to see and understand. It's like making sure the castle is fun for all your friends!

Prototypes are simple visual versions of your ideas. These help test and improve your designs. You can make basic prototypes with paper or more detailed ones with interactive elements. Ensure they're easy to use and read, considering things like text size and navigation.

If in 2024 we still have to even mention that you need to test, then we have failed as UX evangelists. Are there still people/organizations that need convincing on that?

Key point here. Don't assume you know everything, listen to your potential users and what they have to say. Take that feedback and apply it.

Right before, I think I “solved the problem.” I must test it, and that is when you probably find your mistake and, most of all, your user's “mistakes.” Users many times can do things you didn’t expect. The right thing to do before you create a new design is to do a test. Check yourself, Doubt yourself, and my main suggestion is don’t fall in love with your design. Make the right changes that your users need.

It's crucial because making assumptions about your target audience never leads to positive outcomes. Testing with users provides surprising feedback, ensuring a genuine understanding of what will benefit them. Your goal is to enhance their lives, not make things more challenging. If language poses a barrier to entry for your application, leverage the power of icons—the universal language of the internet. Even without knowledge of the native language, users should be able to draw reasonable, intuitive conclusions about the end product.

Assuming things about a product's audience often leads to mistakes. Testing with users can give unexpected but useful insights. The aim is to make user's lives easier. If language is a problem in the app, use icons, which everyone understands. This way, even without knowing the language, users can still figure out how to use your product easily.

Additional Tips: Use culturally relevant symbols and icons. Offer text-to-speech functionality for written content. Provide multiple language options. Make sure the prototype is compatible with assistive technologies like screen readers.

Incorporate voice-based interfaces where possible. This can be very useful for users who find reading challenging. Also use video or audio explanations for complex concepts, which can be easier to understand than text descriptions.

When Working with the Nelson Mandela university and the CTT in South Africa we were faced with helping the population the be more aware of cancer risks, we were faced with cultural barriers, literacy difficulties as well as a bunch of others. Meaning we needed to understand how to best communicate with them. We can always find a solution if we have developed empathy with the target group so we communicate by images and micro animations that we then tested with the help of the university to understand how to evolve from there. In these cases you should always immerse yourself in the community to best solve the issue and make a beautiful user experience and graphic solution

The biggest challenge with designing prototypes for users with low literacy or language barriers is a lack of communication language. The developer neither crosses the threshold of the basic lingo nor converts it to every possible native language. To cope with this problem, I think ICONOGRAPHY is the best solution. The developer must keep the UX journey as short as possible using icons. Icons ought to be globally recognized to make it acceptable at every level of users. Social media like Facebook and WhatsApp are some of the foremost examples of ICONOGRAPHY-based web portals. In every nook and corner of the world social media is highly accepted by almost every type of user no matter how educated one is.

By using icons and simple words in your design, you help create a universal language – easy, clear, and inclusive. It's important to consider and design for as many types of end-user as possible during prototyping.