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Mobile phones and paper documents: evaluating a new approach for capturing microfinance data in rural India

Published: 22 April 2006 Publication History

Abstract

CAM is a user interface toolkit that allows a camera-equipped 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.

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Cited By

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  • (2022)Making Digital Money “Work” for Low-Income UsersResearch Anthology on Microfinance Services and Roles in Social Progress10.4018/978-1-6684-7552-2.ch013(232-250)Online publication date: 23-Sep-2022
  • (2022)Six Feet Apart: Online Payments During the COVID-19 PandemicProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/35552186:CSCW2(1-33)Online publication date: 11-Nov-2022
  • (2022)Digital Payments on the Agenda: How Supply-side Actors Framed Cash and Digital Payments during the COVID-19 Pandemic in IndiaAsian Studies Review10.1080/10357823.2022.206325347:2(336-354)Online publication date: 21-Apr-2022
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    cover image ACM Conferences
    CHI '06: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
    April 2006
    1353 pages
    ISBN:1595933727
    DOI:10.1145/1124772
    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]

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    Published: 22 April 2006

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    Author Tags

    1. ICT
    2. document processing
    3. microfinance
    4. mobile phone
    5. paper user interface
    6. rural development
    7. visual codes

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    April 22 - 27, 2006
    Québec, Montréal, Canada

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    View all
    • (2022)Making Digital Money “Work” for Low-Income UsersResearch Anthology on Microfinance Services and Roles in Social Progress10.4018/978-1-6684-7552-2.ch013(232-250)Online publication date: 23-Sep-2022
    • (2022)Six Feet Apart: Online Payments During the COVID-19 PandemicProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/35552186:CSCW2(1-33)Online publication date: 11-Nov-2022
    • (2022)Digital Payments on the Agenda: How Supply-side Actors Framed Cash and Digital Payments during the COVID-19 Pandemic in IndiaAsian Studies Review10.1080/10357823.2022.206325347:2(336-354)Online publication date: 21-Apr-2022
    • (2022)Ethical Considerations from Child-Robot Interactions in Under-Resourced CommunitiesInternational Journal of Social Robotics10.1007/s12369-022-00882-115:12(2055-2071)Online publication date: 26-May-2022
    • (2021)Detecting Data Falsification by Front-line Development Workers: A Case Study of Vaccination in PakistanProceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3411764.3445630(1-14)Online publication date: 6-May-2021
    • (2021)Illustrating the Gaps and Needs in the Training Support of Community Health Workers in IndiaProceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3411764.3445111(1-16)Online publication date: 6-May-2021
    • (2020)Officers Never Type: Examining the Persistence of Paper in e-GovernanceProceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3313831.3376216(1-13)Online publication date: 21-Apr-2020
    • (2019)Making Digital Money “Work” for Low-Income UsersInternational Journal of Mobile Human Computer Interaction10.4018/IJMHCI.201910010511:4(49-65)Online publication date: Oct-2019
    • (2019)Examining the challenges in development data pipelineProceedings of the 2nd ACM SIGCAS Conference on Computing and Sustainable Societies10.1145/3314344.3332496(13-21)Online publication date: 3-Jul-2019
    • (2019)Designing for Mobile and Immersive Visual Analytics in the FieldIEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics10.1109/TVCG.2019.2934282(1-1)Online publication date: 2019
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