Fortune at the bottom of the pyramid, the: eradicating poverty through profits
Fortune at the bottom of the pyramid, the: eradicating poverty through profits
Who's hogging the bandwidth: the consequences of revealing the invisible in the home
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Mobile-izing health workers in rural India
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Deliberate interactions: characterizing technology use in Nairobi, Kenya
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Mobile telephony access and usage in Africa
ICTD'09 Proceedings of the 3rd international conference on Information and communication technologies and development
Low-infrastructure methods to improve internet access for mobile users in emerging regions
Proceedings of the 20th international conference companion on World wide web
Understanding negotiation in airtime sharing in low-income microenterprises
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
You're capped: understanding the effects of bandwidth caps on broadband use in the home
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Cost-Aware Mobile Web Browsing
IEEE Pervasive Computing
The human infrastructure of ICTD
Proceedings of the 4th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development
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Mobile data usage is on the rise globally. In emerging regions, mobile data is particularly expensive and suffers from the lack of price and data usage transparency needed to make informed decisions about Internet use. To measure and address this problem, we designed SmartBrowse, an Internet proxy system that shows mobile data usage information and provides controls to avoid overspending. In this paper, we discuss the results of a 10-week study with SmartBrowse, involving 299 participants in Ghana. Half the users were given SmartBrowse, and the other half was given a regular Internet experience. Our findings suggest that, compared with the control group, using SmartBrowse led to a significant reduction in Internet credit spend and increased online activity among SmartBrowse users, while providing the same or better mobile Internet user experience. Additionally, SmartBrowse users who were prior mobile data non-users increased their webpage views while spending less money than control users. Our discussion contributes to the understanding of how forward-looking ICTD research in the wild can empower mobile data users, in this case, through increased price transparency.