5.3 Results
All three participants were comfortable with their own phones. They navigated very quickly on it and used several functionalities such as radio, photo camera apart from making and receiving calls. The man from Senegal even used a football app on his iPhone to check the outcome of football matches and who scored since he understood both the number format of scores and the roster, which featured players’ head shots along with icons for goals scored. In terms of SMS all of them knew how to handle and open incoming SMS and used literate helpers for the content. The three of them were numerate and knew how to read date and time but they found the latter easier from a digital than from an analog clock with handles. When asked if she knew how to search for her messages one participant proudly showed how quick she was at searching for new SMS. She knew how to create a new SMS but could not compose text in it. She used SMS very often with the help of literate friends and had 256 SMS in her inbox. “I know how to check the call logs, how to delete, how to do almost everything on my cell phone, the only problem I have is reading and writing SMS.” The Senegalese man never used SMS since it was too long and too complicated for him to try composing one but he had a number of SMS in his inbox, which mostly contained telephone numbers of people along with their names. His wife had read the SMS to him and he consulted them when he needed the phone number of that contact. The two iPhone owners succeeded in sending the SMS “Tonight, no”. The third participant seemed not as confident. She hardly touched the phone during the whole interview even if we encouraged her several times to do so. Worrying that this might embarrass or stress her too much we refrained from pushing her further through the scenario. This participant found it difficult to come up with possible meanings of the icons and struggled with the concept of text being associated with the icons. For her icons represented or were related to actions: “the J means I am talking with someone and the L represents the person I am talking with”. The two iPhone owners roughly understood the meaning of the icons but were not entirely sure. Asked about the meaning of the call icon (depicting a receiver) one said: “This might mean ‘Call me’ or maybe ‘I will call you later’”. Hearing the audio counterpart removed any doubts for them. The idea of having multiple meaning for an icon and making them available (in both versions) through multiple taps was challenging for all participants. None of them succeeded in appending a sentence to the editor and asked for help on what they had to do. In the pre-listen version the length of the entire prompt “One: sentence 1, Two: sentence 2, Three: sentence 3” was too long and at the end the participants could not remember the first sentence anymore. In the version with the pop-up, they were surprised by it and did not know where to tap to listen to the several associated sentences. The corresponding play buttons at the end of each sentence in the pop-up were relatively small but clearly visible. We tested playing back a message with and without the karaoke. With the karaoke, all of them succeeded matching some words to the played sound. While the karaoke was playing, the woman from Morocco remarked: “Oh, yes, cinema, this word is cinema… Ci ne ma” she pointed at the word and tapped on it to check she was right. Without the karaoke, the participants did not even realize there was a link between what they were hearing and the sentence played by the phone. None of our participants seemed uncomfortable with being tested but their confidence varied. The woman from Angola often asked “Am I right? Am I saying the right thing?” while the other two were more self-confident. The man from Senegal immediately wanted to touch the phone, play the messages, drag some icons into the message editor and scroll to go through all the screens. When he and the other iPhone user succeeded in sending the SMS, they asked: “That's it? Is my message really sent?” They seemed surprised by the simplicity. From the beginning, the woman from Morocco was excited about the application: “This could be wonderful for people like me, is it possible to get the application on my mobile phone today?” The other iPhone owner called us one hour after the interview to thank us about dedicating our time to help “people like him” and expressing his interest in obtaining the application. At the end of the test, they seemed proud for helping us and for being useful to help researchers from a respected university. The feedback we obtained from the teachers of the school was very positive and conveyed that the man from Senegal was “transformed” after the session and for the first time he learned his lesson for the next day.