Digital Illiteracy: Digi Sehat

The following is a discussion on how to understand the digital landscape of Pakistan and how the concepts of digital illiteracy apply to it. Credit goes to the whole team for this project. Digi Sehat was a design project that I was a part of.

We interviewed and analyzed 25 people and their interactions with technology for this project. And we used the analyses to make an app that is more accessible!

The Pyramid of digital illiteracy.

We used the pyramid as a scale to judge our interviewees’ level of digital illiteracy.

At the base is the knowledge of how to switch a phone on and at the top is the knowledge of root access.

Is there a link between education and digital literacy?

We tried to insure that our interviewees were from diverse educational backgrounds. In the pie chart below we can see that 30% of our interviewees which can be identified as digitally illiterate have a master’s degree. Similarly, 20% of the interviewees have a degree in bachelors but are digitally illiterate.

Mr. Sajawal who had done Bachelors did not know about WhatsApp or even how to change his wallpaper as said: “I ask my younger cousins to change the ringtone and wallpaper for me.”

~ ~ ~ ~ Education level has little correlation with digital literacy. ~ ~ ~ ~

How do digitally illiterate people use technology?

They don’t use it to remember things they want to recall.

Many people answered the question, ”How do you remember things like medicines etc.?” in the manner, “We just remember it in our minds”. As the graph below shows that 90% of the people do not use anything to remember things and keep a record.

But they want to!

When we asked people if a health tracking application would be helpful? All of the user replied with “YES” and one of the users said, “It will be great if there is any application that can remember my medicine times and such stuff”.

Are they reluctant to explore or they just can’t?!

One interviewee explained:

“I have never used the application before so how would I know how to use it” while on the other hand when we asked him to change the wallpaper, he was successfully able to do it.

A Similar pattern can be seen in the chart below which is based on the question about the most hard to understand thing or feature because of which it becomes difficult for people to use the application or mobile phones in general. Majority of the people said things like, “The design is unfamiliar” or “I have never used anything like this so I do not know”.

People do not want to learn rather they want to use. Yet the applications we design assume that the user is willing to learn a fair bit. We ought to design how they expect it to be rather than following our own ideas.

Digitally illiterate people usually have less apps!

The reason behind that can be that either they do not know how to download applications or they do not require any other applications or find them useful. Because when we asked Ms. Atiya if she knew how to use the App Store, she said, “I only have WhatsApp and TikTok in my mobile phone and I do not know how to download applications from the Play Store. I just ask someone to do it for me.”

Only 20% of the interviewees had more than 5 apps.

Conclusion

The digitally illiterate of pakistan can use technology but they do not know how to learn using more of it. Is this the lack of online resources? Lack of onboarding to Operating Systems? Maybe it’s the culture? Who knows but one thing is for sure no matter how much a person is educated they can still face issues in using technology.

A lot of research still needs to be done to cover up the gap that exists in the usability of technology in our society.