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

TS Parikh, P Javid, SK, K Ghosh… - Proceedings of the SIGCHI …, 2006 - dl.acm.org
TS Parikh, P Javid, SK, K Ghosh, K Toyama
Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human Factors in computing systems, 2006dl.acm.org
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 …
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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