A Text Free Mobile App User Interface Design Approach: The Case Of M-Pregnancy _Care

Abstract

Mobile phones are becoming a booming new technology in the developing world. They have proven to be valuable tools to improve the life quality of the local population. Yet we cannot expect to be able to apply conventional mobile user interfaces design in mobile apps for the local population. Ethiopia has one of the highest levels of illiteracy, and there are many cultural oriented UI design issues. The main focus of this research was to deal with how a mobile app user interface should designed for semi/illiterate users. This research was conducted as a case study in Ethiopian Merci non-governmental health center. The user-centered design methodology was used to focus on the users as the heart of the design process. This in turn supports results in products that are more likely to provide what the users need and want. To this end, a mobile application was designed to provide pregnancy advice to all women who have diversified cultural background and illiteracy problem. The result is a model that is designed to help mobile app developers with a number of UI guidelines to follow and considerations to be made while designing the mobile app for similar kind of users. It has been evaluated by developing the design of a use case application, and by collecting survey analysis of user satisfaction level it. The prototype achieves good performance and meets the objective of the study. Given the existing knowledge gap among pregnant women, availability smartphone in the market, this work would in lights idea for both health sectors and mobile app developers on how to improve knowledge of pregnant women.