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User experience evaluation metrics for usable accounting tools

Published: 11 October 2010 Publication History

Abstract

Small Medium and Micro Enterprises (SMMEs) have become active instruments for poverty alleviation, employment generation as well as economic and social development. However, SMMEs in developing countries operate under effervescent business environments characterised by high inflation rates, poor technology infrastructure, lack of business expertise and resources. There is a need for these organisations to strategically align their business processes for them to adapt and survive in the operating environment turbulence. There are dozens of application software designed specifically to support SMME business processes on the market. On the contrary, software developers pay little attention to the user experience and usability aspects of their products resulting in the packages falling short on overall usability. Highly usable applications improve users' productivity, satisfaction and service quality delivery. Hence SMMEs in developing countries should implement software tools with usable user interfaces. Considering the applications' usability failure it becomes vital to research the user experiences of a typical accounting tool commonly used in developing countries' SMMEs. This paper proposes evaluation metrics that are applicable to evaluate the User Experience (UX) of a chosen accounting tool commonly used in developing countries. The paper introduces a brief background on the current situation in typical developing countries' SMMEs. A discussion on the accounting tools used in SMMEs operating in developing countries follows with a definition of UX, its facets and evaluation methods. Evaluation results on the UX of Pastel accounting, Xpress 2009 is presented. The paper culminates with metrics proposed to evaluate the user experience of accounting tools and proposes future work to improve on the proposed metrics.

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  • (2024)Conversational agents and momentary user experience: an assessment using an electroencephalography deviceUniversal Access in the Information Society10.1007/s10209-024-01144-9Online publication date: 19-Aug-2024
  • (2023)Underlying Factors of Technology Acceptance and User Experience of Machine Learning Functions in Accounting Software: A Qualitative Content AnalysisHCI International 2023 – Late Breaking Papers10.1007/978-3-031-48060-7_31(413-433)Online publication date: 23-Jul-2023
  • (2021)CoKnowEMe: An Edge Evaluation Scheme for QoS of IoMT Microservices in 6G ScenarioFuture Internet10.3390/fi1307017713:7(177)Online publication date: 7-Jul-2021
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cover image ACM Conferences
SAICSIT '10: Proceedings of the 2010 Annual Research Conference of the South African Institute of Computer Scientists and Information Technologists
October 2010
447 pages
ISBN:9781605589503
DOI:10.1145/1899503
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Sponsors

  • AAIICT: African Advanced Institute for Information & Communications Technology
  • NRF
  • ACM: Association for Computing Machinery
  • CSIR: CSIR
  • Microsoft: Microsoft
  • ASFKP-ICT: South Africa-Finland Knowledge Partnership on ICT
  • SAICSIT: So. African Inst. Of Computer Scientists & Info Tecnologists
  • Telkom: Telkom
  • IFIP

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 11 October 2010

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Author Tags

  1. accounting tools
  2. developing countries
  3. small medium micro enterprises
  4. usability
  5. user experience
  6. user interface design

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  • Research-article

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SAICSIT '10
Sponsor:
  • AAIICT
  • ACM
  • CSIR
  • Microsoft
  • ASFKP-ICT
  • SAICSIT
  • Telkom

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Overall Acceptance Rate 187 of 439 submissions, 43%

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Cited By

View all
  • (2024)Conversational agents and momentary user experience: an assessment using an electroencephalography deviceUniversal Access in the Information Society10.1007/s10209-024-01144-9Online publication date: 19-Aug-2024
  • (2023)Underlying Factors of Technology Acceptance and User Experience of Machine Learning Functions in Accounting Software: A Qualitative Content AnalysisHCI International 2023 – Late Breaking Papers10.1007/978-3-031-48060-7_31(413-433)Online publication date: 23-Jul-2023
  • (2021)CoKnowEMe: An Edge Evaluation Scheme for QoS of IoMT Microservices in 6G ScenarioFuture Internet10.3390/fi1307017713:7(177)Online publication date: 7-Jul-2021
  • (2020)Usability evaluation of frugal innovation: A case of mobile training for micro businesses in TanzaniaAfrican Journal of Science, Technology, Innovation and Development10.1080/20421338.2020.1772951(1-14)Online publication date: 4-Jul-2020
  • (2016)A Systematic Review About User Experience EvaluationDesign, User Experience, and Usability: Design Thinking and Methods10.1007/978-3-319-40409-7_42(445-455)Online publication date: 22-Jun-2016
  • (2013)Managing User Experience – Managing ChangeHuman-Computer Interaction – INTERACT 201310.1007/978-3-642-40480-1_46(660-677)Online publication date: 2013

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