Interactive visualization for low literacy users: from lessons learnt to design

This paper aims to address the problems low literacy (LL) users face when searching for information online. The first part of this paper summarizes the problems that LL user's face, and establishes a set of design principles for interfaces suitable for LL users. This is followed by a description of how these design principles are mapped to a novel interface for interactive data retrieval. The interface was realized into a working system and evaluated against a traditional web interface for both high literacy (HL) and LL users. The suitability of the designs was analyzed using performance data, subjective feedback and an observational analysis. The findings from the study suggest that LL users perform better and prefer the proposed designs over a traditional web interface.

Conference held in Austin, TX, USA, 5-10 May 2012.