An Icon Taxonomy for Semi-Literate Communities

Icons, or pictorial and graphical objects, are commonly used in human-computer interaction (HCI) fields as the mediator in order to communicate information to users. However, there have been little studies focusing on the majority of the world’s population – semi-literate communities – in terms of icon design. In this study, a new icon taxonomy of four quadrants, namely abstract-general, abstract-contextual, concrete-general, and concrete-contextual, are proposed for evaluating performance for icons designed for semi-literate communities. Paper-based questionnaires of icon preference and comprehension are utilized in two farming villages in India. Based on the experiments and analysis, icons fall in the quadrant of concrete-contextual is proved to perform best in both icon preference and comprehension. The influence of cultural dimension (contextual or general) has more significant impact on icon performance than structural formation (abstract or concrete). The best and worst performed icons are also discussed in this paper