Information and communication technology users in rural communities of developing countries are still learners and also lack the knowledge of the potentials of these technologies. To enhance the usability and promote the acceptance of information technologies into their daily life, the medium of interaction should be able to meet the capabilities and cultural preferences of the target users. User interface design for products and services targeting rural users is a big challenge and requires adequate effort, proper understanding of the users and their socio-cultural environments. A study was conducted to design a mobile user interface for users in a rural community in South Africa. The aim of the study is to bring information technology services closer to the people and encourage micro-economic activities in the community. The objective is to design a user interface that will be easy to use and meet users' cultural preferences. We have applied user-centred design methods and collected both qualitative and quantitative data to guide the design process. This paper presents the design of a shop-owner user interface and a mobile commerce application to promote rural microentrepreneurship and economic development. The evaluation of the user interface with the target users was conducted and the technology acceptance model was used to measure users' perception of the shop-owner user interface. The statistics analysis of the data shows that users perceive the application and interface as useful, easy to use and intend to use the system.
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 microentrepreneurs 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.In section 2, we present a summary of related work and the user-centred approach we adopted for this study. Section 3 describes the design phases and the research method that was used, section 4 presents the results and analysis of the data collected during the design process. In section 5 we discuss and conclude and also share the lessons learned during the study.
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