Strategies to Embed Human Values in Agriculture Mobile Apps: What Do End-Users and Practitioners Think?
47 Pages Posted: 23 Aug 2023
Abstract
Given the ubiquity of mobile apps in daily lives, understanding and reflecting end-users’ human values (e.g., transparency, privacy) in apps has become increasingly important. Violations of end users’ values by software applications have resulted in a wide range of difficulties for end users. Value violations may bring more and lasting problems for marginalized groups of end-users. This research aims to understand the extent to which Bangladeshi female farmers' values, marginalized and vulnerable end-users, who are less studied by the software engineering community, are reflected in agriculture apps in Bangladesh. Further to this, we aim to identify possible strategies to embed their values in those apps. To this end, we conducted a mixed-methods empirical study consisting of 13 interviews with app practitioners and focus groups with 20 Bangladeshi female farmers. The accumulated results from the interviews and focus groups identified 22 values of Bangladeshi female farmers, which the participants expect to be reflected in the agriculture apps. Among these 22 values, 15 values (e.g., accuracy) are already reflected and 7 values (e.g., accessibility) are ignored/violated in the existing agriculture apps. We also identified 14 strategies (e.g., “applying human-centered approaches to elicit values”) to address Bangladeshi female farmers’ values in agriculture apps.
Keywords: Human Values, software engineering, Mobile App Development, Mixed-Methods Empirical Study, Marginalized End Users, Bangladeshi Agriculture Apps
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation