Usability as Critical Success Factor of Mobile App for Pesticides Authenticity Verification: Reducing Risks for Farmers in Tanzania

Every year many accidents happen, the environment is damaged and financial resources are lost, particularly by smallholder farmers, due to the use of counterfeit pesticides products. Authorities, who are controlling the sale and use of those products, often struggle to keep up with the circulation of counterfeit products. A new electronic pesticides authenticity verification system, replacing a paper-based system, was recently developed. It includes a smartphone app, as main interface for smallholder farmers and inspectors of the pesticides regulatory authority. We present results of formative and summative usability tests, performed on the mobile application. Usability of a software product indicates to what extent the software is acceptable and usable by the target audience. The tests were done with the two main groups of pesticides stakeholders involved in buying and inspecting pesticides quality, the farmers and pesticides inspectors. Both user groups managed to perform all the scheduled tasks within the benchmarked time. In formative as well as summative usability tests the System Usability Scale (SUS) scores exceeded the average. Adoption of the app by the pesticides regulatory authority in Tanzania promises an increase in safety for humans and environment. The current app can be further improved by replacing numerical data entry by the users with image recognition to identify product specific numerical identifiers.