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Mobile phones and paper documents: evaluating a new approach for capturing microfinance data in rural India by Tapan S. Parikh; Paul Javid; Sasikumar K.; Kaushik Ghosh; Kentaro Toyama is a scholarly article available to read on EtoBox.

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

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

Tapan S. Parikh; Paul Javid; Sasikumar K.; Kaushik Ghosh; Kentaro Toyama

Publisher

ACM

Published

2006

Language

EN