India's extensive Self-Help Group (SHG) microfinance network brings formal savings and credit services to 86 million poor households. Yet, the inability to maintain high-quality records remains a persistent weakness in SHG functioning. We study this problem and present a financial record management application built on a low-cost digital slate prototype. The solution directly accepts handwritten input on ordinary paper forms and provides immediate electronic feedback. A field trial with 200 SHG members in rural India shows that the use of the digital slate solution results in shorter data recording time, fewer incorrect entries, and more complete records. The paper-pen-slate solution performs as well as, and is strongly preferred over, a purely electronic alternative. The digital slate solution is able to comfortably move between paper and digital worlds, achieving efficiency and quality gains while catering to the preferences and budgets of low-income low-literate clients.
Online search evaluation metrics are typically derived based on implicit feedback from the users. For instance, computing the number of page clicks, number of queries, or dwell time on a search result. In a recent paper, Dupret and Lalmas introduced a new metric called absence time, which uses the time interval between successive sessions of users to measure their satisfaction with the system. They evaluated this metric on a version of Yahoo! Answers. In this paper, we investigate the effectiveness of absence time in evaluating new features in a web search engine, such as new ranking algorithm or a new user interface. We measured the variation of absence time to the effects of 21 experiments performed on a search engine. Our findings show that the outcomes of absence time agreed with the judgement of human experts performing a thorough analysis of a wide range of online and offline metrics in 14 out of these 21 cases.We also investigated the relationship between absence time and a set of commonly-used covariates (features) such as the number of queries and clicks in the session. Our results suggest that users are likely to return to the search engine sooner when their previous session has more queries and more clicks.
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