Edim Azom Emmanuel
ABSTRACT
Economic activities in rural areas of developing countries are usually not strong enough to impact significantly in poverty alleviation and improve rural life. These communities are often marginalized in terms of basic infrastructures; low economic activities and limited markets. However, they possess market potentials in agriculture and micro-enterprises. Information and communication technologies can be use to develop these potentials by opening these markets beyond the local borders. Our objective is to explore the potentials of information technologies for rural economy development by bringing mobile added value to potential users. Our aim is to design a mobile user interface that will be easy to use by rural micro-entrepreneurs who have little or no previous experience of the mobile commerce technology. In order to design the application and user interface, we conducted a case study in Dwesa community and applied user-centered design methods in the design process. Qualitative and quantitative methods were used to gather user data. This paper presents the design process, and user evaluation of the prototype mobile user interface. The user evaluation of the prototype was conducted and the descriptive statistics of users' performance is presented. The result shows that the evaluators who had no prior experience with this technology recorded minimum tasks completion time and with few errors, and an increasing level of precision in task performance as they continue to use the interface; which is a positive indication on the usability of the user-interface.
- Batchelor, S., Scott, N. 2005. Good Practice Paper on ICTs for economic growth and poverty reduction. The DAC journal Vol. 6, No. 3, 37--64.Google Scholar
- Costabile, M. F. 2001. Usability in the Software Life Cycle, In: Handbook of Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering. S. K. Chang Ed., World Scientific Publishing Company, Vol. 1, 179--192.Google Scholar
- Dalvit, L., Thinyane M., Muyingi H. and Terzoli A., 2007. The Deployment of an e-Commerce Platform and Related Projects in a Rural Area in South Africa, International journal of Computing and ICT Research, Vol. 1, No. 1, 9--18.Google Scholar
- Dedrick, J., Gurbaxini, V., Kraemer, K. 2003. Information technology and economic performance: A critical review of the empirical evidence. ACM computing surveys, Vol. 35, No. 1, 1--28. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Dyakalashe, S.: 2009. Cultural and Linguistic Localization of the Virtual Sop-owners End of E-commerce Platforms for Rural development. MSC thesis, Computer Science department, University of Fort Hare, South Africa.Google Scholar
- Heeks, R. 2008. ICT4D 2.0: The Next Phase of Applying ICT for International Development. Computer, Vol. 41, No. 6, 26--33. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Huenerfauth M. P. 2002. Design Approaches for Developing User-Interfaces Accessible to Illiterate Users. In: Proceedings of the 18th National conference on Artificial intelligence, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.Google Scholar
- International Telecommunication Union, Measuring Village ICT in Sub-Saharan Africa. Available: www.itu.int/ITU-D/ict/statistics/material/Africa_Village_ICT_2007.pdf. (Access July, 2008)Google Scholar
- Johnson, C. M., Johnson, T. R. and Zhang, J. 2005. A user-centered framework for redesigning health care interfaces. Journal of Biomed. Informatics, 38, 75--87. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Kang, K. and Corbitt, B. 2001. Effectiveness of Graphical Components in Web Site E-commerce Application -- A Cultural Perspective. EJISD, Vol. 7, No 2, 1--6.Google Scholar
- Kinzie, M. B., Cohn, W. F. and Julian, M. F. 2002. A User-centered Model for Web Site Design. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, 320--330.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Lalji, Z. and Good, J. 2008. Designing new technologies for illiterate populations: A study in mobile phone interface design. Interacting with Computers Vol. 20, 574--586. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Marcus, A. 2001. Cross-cultural user-interface design for work, home, play, and on the way", In: Proceedings of the 19th annual international conference on computer documentation, Sante Fe, New Mexico, USA, 221--222. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Medhi, I., Sagar, A., Toyama, K. 2006. Text-Free User Interfaces for Illiterate and Semi-Literate Users. In Proc. International Conference on Information and Communications Technologies and Development, 72--82.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Nielson, J. 1995. Usability Inspection Methods. CHI'95 Mosaic of Creativity, (May 7--11, 1995), 377--378. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Pade, C., Palmer, R., Kavhai, M. and Gumbo, S. 2009. Siyakhula Living Lab Baseline study Report. (April, 2009).Google Scholar
- Patel, N., Agarwal, S., Rajput, N., Kumar, A., Nanavati, A., Dave, P. and Parikh, T. S. 2008. Experiences Designing a Voice Interface for Rural India. In Proceedings of the IEEE Workshop on Spoken Language Technology for Development (SLT), 21--25.Google Scholar
- Peleg, M., Shachak, A., Wang, D. and Kernieli, E. 2009. Using Multi-perspective Methodologies to Study Users' Interactions with the Prototype front end of a Guideline-based Decision Support system for Diabetic Foot Care. Int'l journal of Medical Informatics, Vol. 78, 482--493.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Rosson, M. B. and Carroll, J. M. 2002. Usability Engineering: Scenario-Based Development of Human-Computer Interaction. Morgan Kaufmann Publishers. Google ScholarCross Ref
- Scott, I. 2009. Cell phones in Africa: Improving literacy and agricultural market information systems in Niger. Available: http://www.isbrandt.com/ (Accessed on 18 November, 2009)Google Scholar
- Sherwani, J., Ali, N., Mirza, S., Fatma, A., Memon, Y., Karim, M., Tongia, R., Rosenfeld, R. 2007. HealthLine: Speechbased Access to Health Information by Low-literate Users. In Proc. Int'l conf. of Information & Communication Technologies and Development, Bangalore, India.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Shen, S., Woolley, M. and Prior S. 2006. Towards culture-centered design. Interacting with Computers, Vol. 18, 820--852. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Shneiderman, B. 1998. Designing the User Interface: strategies for effective Human-Computer Interaction (3r ed). Addison Wesley Longman, Reading, Mass.Google Scholar
- Sicelo, G. N. 2007. Implementation of a Virtual shopping mall for Dwesa, a rural area in the Eastern Cape, South Africa. MSC thesis, Department of Computer Science, University of Fort Hare, South Africa.Google Scholar
- Smith, A., Dunckley, L., French, T., Minocha, S., and Chang, Y. 2004. A Process Model for Developing Usable Cross-cultural Web Sites. Interacting with Computers, Vol. 16, 63--91.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Tong, M. C. A., and Robertson, K. 2008. Political and Cultural Representation in Malaysian Websites. Int'l J. of Design, Vol. 2, No. 2, 67--79.Google Scholar
- World Bank report, 2009. Connecting Africa: How ICT is Transforming a Continent. Availabe: http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/NEWS/0, contentMDK:21526131~pagePK:34370~piPK:34424~theSitPK:4607,00.html. (Accessed 20 August, 2008).Google Scholar
- W3C, 2009. The role of Mobile Technologies in Fostering Social and Economic Development, W3C Workshop Report. Maputo, (1--2 April 2009), Mozambique. Available: http://www.w3.org/2008/10/MW4D_WS/ (Accessed 15 November, 2009).Google Scholar
- Xavier, F., Juristo, N., Windl, H. and Constantine, L. 2001. Usability Basics for Software Developers. IEEE. Software, Vol. 18, No. 1, 22--29. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Zafeiri, K., Gavalas, D., Balla, A. 2006. Selling culture: implementation of e-commerce and WAP-based prototypes", International Review on Computers and Software, Vol. 1, 68--76.Google Scholar
Index Terms
- A mobile commerce application for rural economy development: a case study for Dwesa
Recommendations
Moving Beyond Digital Literacy and Towards e-Governance in Rural India
ICEGOV '17: Proceedings of the Special Collection on eGovernment Innovations in IndiaThe ongoing Digital India Programme envisions universal digital literacy. This reflexive piece considers the context of this bold declaration to universalize digital literacy in rural India. We present civil society perspective on social challenges of ...
Emergent practices around CGNet Swara, voice forum for citizen journalism in rural India
ICTD '12: Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and DevelopmentRural communities in India are often underserved by the mainstream media. While there is a public discourse surrounding the issues they face, this dialogue typically takes place on television, in newspaper editorials, and on the Internet. Unfortunately, ...
Mobile governance for development: strategies for migrant head porters in Ghana
ICEGOV '11: Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Theory and Practice of Electronic GovernanceA promising strategy to promote good governance is harnessing the opportunities provided by the use of mobile phones, widely accessible to most segments of the society, for delivering public information and services and for decision-making by ...
Comments