A Mobile Commerce Application for Rural Economy Development: A case study for Dwesa

摘要

Economic activities in rural areas of developing countries are usually not strong enough to impact significantly in poverty alleviation and improve rural life. These communities are often marginalized in terms of basic infrastructures; low economic activities and limited markets. However, they possess market potentials in agriculture and micro-enterprises. Information and communication technologies can be use to develop these potentials by opening these markets beyond the local borders. Our objective is to explore the potentials of information technologies for rural economy development by bringing mobile added value to potential users. Our aim is to design a mobile user interface that will be easy to use by rural micro-entrepreneurs who have little or no previous experience of the mobile commerce technology. In order to design the application and user interface, we conducted a case study in Dwesa community and applied user-centered design methods in the design process. Qualitative and quantitative methods were used to gather user data. This paper presents the design process, and user evaluation of the prototype mobile user interface. The user evaluation of the prototype was conducted and the descriptive statistics of users' performance is presented. The result shows that the evaluators who had no prior experience with this technology recorded minimum tasks completion time and with few errors, and an increasing level of precision in task performance as they continue to use the interface; which is a positive indication on the usability of the user-interface.