First-Aid Application for Illiterates and Its Usability Evaluation

First-Aid guidance is important for both literates and illiterates. Almost all available information about First-Aid on websites is in textual form and is beneficial to literates only. In this research an ICT solution is conceived as an iPhone Operating System (iOS) mobile application to educate illiterate population of Mardan, KPK Pakistan about some basics of First-Aid. Two similar mobile applications were developed with two different interfaces: a sketch-based interface and an image-based interface. Both interfaces were tested on 50 illiterates and 49 students of software engineering to evaluate usability of the application for illiterates. The results showed that the specific hand drawn sketches visualizing different First-Aid activities were better understood by the illiterates as compared to image based interfaces. In addition there was no clear difference of usage between literates and illiterates while they were using sketch based interfaces which shows sketch based interfaces are more usable for both types of users. However, there were significant differences of usage between literates and illiterates while using image based interfaces application showing non-usability of image based interfaces for illiterate population.