English Class
Mobile Phones and Paper Documents: Evaluating A New Approach for Capturing Microfinance Data in Rural India
Tapan Parikh, Paul Javid Sasikumar K. Department of CSE ekgaon technologies Univ. of Washington Madurai, India tapan,pjavid@cs.washington.edu sasi@ekgaon.com Kaushik Ghosh Human Factors India Mumbai, India kaushik@humanfactors.com
ABSTRACT
CAM is a user interface toolkit that allows a cameraequipped mobile phone to interact with paper documents. It is designed to automate inefficient, paper-intensive information processes in the developing world. In this paper we present a usability evaluation of an application built using CAM for collecting data from microfinance groups in rural India. This application serves an important and immediate need in the microfinance industry. Our quantitative results show that the user interface is efficient, accurate and can quickly be learned by rural users. The results were competitive with an equivalent PC-based UI. Qualitatively, the interface was found easy to use by almost all users. This shows that, with a properly designed user interface, mobile phones can be a preferred platform for many rural computing applications. Voice feedback and numeric data entry were particularly well-received by users. We are conducting a pilot of this application with 400 microfinance groups in India.
Author Keywords
Mobile phones have been cited as the most likely modern digital tool to support economic development in underdeveloped regions [18]. As shown in the example of Grameen Phone [2], if a phone is shared by a group of people, it can be afforded by even the poorest communities. For rural computing applications, a mobile phone has inherent advantages over a PC in terms of cost, portability and familiarity to users. Previously, we conducted a design experiment with microfinance groups in rural India [17]. We observed that paper plays an important role in group record-keeping. We demonstrated that a user interface based on graphical
Tapan Parikh, Paul Javid Sasikumar K. Department of CSE ekgaon technologies Univ. of Washington Madurai, India tapan,pjavid@cs.washington.edu sasi@ekgaon.com Kaushik Ghosh Human Factors India Mumbai, India kaushik@humanfactors.com
ABSTRACT
CAM is a user interface toolkit that allows a cameraequipped mobile phone to interact with paper documents. It is designed to automate inefficient, paper-intensive information processes in the developing world. In this paper we present a usability evaluation of an application built using CAM for collecting data from microfinance groups in rural India. This application serves an important and immediate need in the microfinance industry. Our quantitative results show that the user interface is efficient, accurate and can quickly be learned by rural users. The results were competitive with an equivalent PC-based UI. Qualitatively, the interface was found easy to use by almost all users. This shows that, with a properly designed user interface, mobile phones can be a preferred platform for many rural computing applications. Voice feedback and numeric data entry were particularly well-received by users. We are conducting a pilot of this application with 400 microfinance groups in India.
Author Keywords
Mobile phones have been cited as the most likely modern digital tool to support economic development in underdeveloped regions [18]. As shown in the example of Grameen Phone [2], if a phone is shared by a group of people, it can be afforded by even the poorest communities. For rural computing applications, a mobile phone has inherent advantages over a PC in terms of cost, portability and familiarity to users. Previously, we conducted a design experiment with microfinance groups in rural India [17]. We observed that paper plays an important role in group record-keeping. We demonstrated that a user interface based on graphical