For a few years, in and out of university, I was involved in a few literacy initiatives. From those experiences with literacy work, I gained some insights that have carried into my User Experience work:
Hidden Corrective Lenses
For many people with reading difficulties, the issue is not with comprehension but with perception. It may not be that words just appear blurry. Letter may look sharp, but be perceived as floating on the page. Spaces may appear where they aren’t supposed to or disappear between words entirely.
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For some people running into problems like that, it was found that if they used a simple coloured transparency over the text they were reading, the problems they had disappeared. Many had struggled for a long time with reading difficulties, and this simple solution offered them a breakthrough.
I see this relating to user experience work in reminding me it’s impossible to really know other people’s perceptions. There may be cognitive or visual deficiencies involved, or perhaps just small differences in culture, knowledge, or experience that interfere with them seeing the way the you know it is. But there may be simple solutions that help make things clearer for them —or for you— but have to look to find it. And you do that by working with them to find that answer.
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Who’s Goal Is It? (Hint: Not Yours)
In helping people learn to read or do math, some folks start off with a vision of the client relaxing in an armchair flipping through War and Peace or taking to the chalkboard in a Good Will Hunting moment. Problem is: that’s not what the client wants. All he wants is to understand his phone bill or read the letter from his granddaughter.
On the user experience side as well as in literacy, we may start out with lofty goals that we know will help people out, even with the best of intentions. But if the goals aren’t related to what the end-user wants, it’s all for naught. Worse yet, forcing you own goals may even frustrate him to the point of giving up on his own goals.
Early Intervention
Many people who’ve experienced literacy problems learn to give up early and, without proper support, fall even further behind as they continue through school and into adulthood. Therefore, many literacy campaigns attempt to intervene very early, discovering problems early on and ensuring support is there before a child has learned to give up.
To me, this speaks to a couple things in user experience. The first is to interact with end-users early on in development of new systems to avoid problems down the road. The second is to ensure proper support exists throughout a person’s experience with a product, helping her be successful in what she is trying to do.
Hope
Even though some people don’t find help with literacy early, they can still be very successful, overcoming obstacles with determination and resourcefulness. For example, one story I remember is one of a Toronto man who couldn’t read the signage, but navgiated his way around the subway system by memorizing the station tiles.
In the UX world, this reminds me that people are not stupid, and not to listen to others that label them that way: whether it’s with knowing how a computer works, the “correct rules” to follow, or using an application. Despite running into difficulties they will often find some way to overcome them to get done what they need to do. This may take them off the obvious routes you’ve laid out for them, or even entirely out of the system you’ve planned. So learn what those routes are, and why they took them in the first place.
