Literacy Bridge
Take a look at our current button layout for the Talking Book Device.
Talking Book front
The main navigational buttons are four arrows: up, down, left, right. Now take a look at a user guide written by Emily Onufer, one of our pilot interns. This guide was prepared on very short notice for the director of basic education at Ghana Education Service in late January, and it gives a sense of the latest audio user interface that is currently being used in our pilot program in northern Ghana.
If you follow the guide, you’ll see that the left and right buttons are used to change subjects; the up and down buttons change messages within the selected subject. But once you’ve moved into one of those messages, the left and right arrows now move the user to different parts of that message/audio recording. The default behavior is +/- 10 seconds, but different applications can use those buttons for other navigational jumps.
When I give demos of the device, I sometimes wonder if it is counter-intuitive that the left/right buttons no longer change subjects once you’ve selected a title. Our solution is that the “home” button brings you to the main entry point, where left and right arrows change subjects again.
Users in our pilot program seem to be fine with this design; in fact, they drove the design to where it is today, simplifying an earlier design brought to them for the pilot. But I still wonder if there is a better compromise between button consistency and flexible functionality without too many buttons.