Resumen de The Usability of IVRs for Smart City Crowdsourcing in Developing Cities

Thayne Breetzke, Stephen Flowerday

• The Public Safety Smart City Project explores the use of an interactive voice response (IVR) system by citizens of a city in a developing country to ease urban challenges arising as a result of growing urbanisation. Given that usability problems can prevent users from adopting and using any system, the IVR system was designed with the user in mind by endeavouring to meet key usability goals. The study sought to determine whether these citizens would deem such an IVR channel usable for telephonically reporting public safety matters and whether any noteworthy usability issues arose. By means of a survey, citizens who participated in this study assessed the system’s usability. The survey results showed that from a usability perspective, an IVR system is an effective crowdsourcing channel for citizens to report such matters. In addition, the paper suggests recommendations for designing and building participatory crowdsourcing IVR channels for similar projects, from the end-user perspective, to avoid potential usability problems.