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A comparison of mobile money-transfer UIs for non-literate and semi-literate users

Published: 04 April 2009 Publication History

Abstract

Due to the increasing penetration of mobile phones even into poor communities, mobile payment schemes could bring formal financial services to the "unbanked". However, because poverty for the most part also correlates with low levels of formal education, there are questions as to whether electronic access to complex financial services is enough to bridge the gap, and if so, what sort of UI is best.
In this paper, we present two studies that provide preliminary answers to these questions. We first investigated the usability of existing mobile payment services, through an ethnographic study involving 90 subjects in India, Kenya, the Philippines and South Africa. This was followed by a usability study with another 58 subjects in India, in which we compared non-literate and semi-literate subjects on three systems: text-based, spoken dialog (without text), and rich multimedia (also without text). Results confirm that non-text designs are strongly preferred over text-based designs and that while task-completion rates are better for the rich multimedia UI, speed is faster and less assistance is required on the spoken-dialog system.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    CHI '09: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
    April 2009
    2426 pages
    ISBN:9781605582467
    DOI:10.1145/1518701
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    Published: 04 April 2009

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    Author Tags

    1. illiteracy
    2. mobile banking
    3. mobile interfaces

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    • (2024)Addressing the Technology Learning Divide Using Co-Learning with Familiarization MethodExtended Abstracts of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613905.3650969(1-8)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
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