Designing interactive voice response (IVR) interfaces: Localisation for low literacy users

Abstract

In this paper, we address the issue of how to design IVR interfaces for the developing world. Against the backdrop of the following idiosyncratic observations including, the majority of users being either semi-literate or non-literate, and the impact of a different set of social-cultural, linguistic, and domestic challenges, amongst others, we advocate the enculturation of IVR interfaces different from the developed world. This requires the tailoring of functionalities and interactive modalities to the cultural values and context of use. Thus, we propose a dialog (user interface) design model consisting of three components: Get input, Error-recovery, and Play results (output). These are shown to be critical for implementing usable and culturally-suitable IVR interfaces for low-literacy user populations.