Designing Web‐based Forms for Users with Lower Literacy Skills

Abstract

) has identified patterns of behavior and effective practices related to how lower literacy users interact with health-related Internet sites. However, prior research has not addressed how such users react to the unique challenges represented by interactive medical forms on health sites, such as interactive health quizzes, questionnaires, and registration forms. The goal of this four-month study was twofold: 1) to identify reading, writing, and navigational strategies of users with lower literacy skills when interacting with web-based forms in a medical context; 2) to develop design principles for making such web-based medical forms usable and accessible for lower-literacy adults. Eyetracking was used to gather data about how users interacted with a variety of web-based forms. Analysis of sessions with 26 low-literacy users (REALM score < 60) identified a variety of challenges users faced in completing forms. Based on these observations, proposed principles of effective form design were developed. Revised prototype forms were designed in accordance with these principles and iteratively tested with 14 users to verify improved usability. BACKGROUND

Password creation strategies across high‐ and low‐literacy web users

“…As online communication was not a primary concern for this particular group of users, they often did not have an email address or were unable to remember the password (or user name) for an account they had previously created. This confirms findings from previous research about the difficulty low literacy Web users experience in creating accounts (Summers et al, ). Future research remains to be done in order to explore perceptions of password security within the low‐literacy population as a whole, as opposed to perceptions about password security held by the subgroup of Web users with low literacy who do use passwords (as in the current study).…”

“…Internet users with low literacy skills face challenges in navigating, searching, and reading information online (Birru et al, ; Birru & Steinman, ; Kodagoda & Wong, ; Summers & Summers, 2005). They face particular difficulties in navigating forms online—including challenges in creating usernames and passwords (Summers et al, ). For these internet users, the strain caused by password usability issues adds to their existing cognitive burden.…”

Low Literacy Users

“…It is common to see them skip over headings, sometimes landing right in the middle of a paragraph. As a result, they often miss the answer they were looking for or the cues that would tell them whether their question was likely to be addressed on the page or not (Summers & Summers, 2004, 2005Summers et al, 2006). If eye tracking shows that participants with lower literacy skills are doing a lot of skipping on your interface, you need to find ways to make your text look easier to read (Doak et al, 1996; Figure 13.4).…”

Adapting web content for low-literacy readers by using lexical elaboration and named entities labeling

“…Text Elaboration aims at clarifying and explaining information and making connections explicit in a text, using definitions, synonyms or hypernyms of the text words. Text simplification can be used to maximize the comprehension of low literacy users since mismatching the reading level of the application textual media with the reading skills of users can impact severally on the users access to the application [4,26].…”