Developing countries like India are observing an increasing trend in the penetration of mobile phones towards the base of the pyramid (lower strata of the society). This segment comprises of users who are novice and semi-literate and are interested in the basic usage of the mobile phone. This paper explores one of the basic features, the address book for its usability and presents an enhanced symbol-based design to cater for the semi-literate user. The enhancement uses symbols to replace current text based storage and retrieval and also includes a call distribution based address book access to align with the skewed nature of the user’s requirements. The results of a preliminary evaluation of the prototype are encouraging regarding the value perceived through the design.
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