Investigating end-users' values in agriculture mobile applications development: An empirical study on Bangladeshi female farmers

The omnipresent nature of mobile applications (apps) in all aspects of daily lives raises the necessity of reflecting end-users' values (e.g., fairness, honesty, social recognition, etc.) in apps. However, there are limited considerations of end-users' values in apps development. Value violations by apps have been reported in the media and are responsible for end-users' dissatisfaction and negative socio-economic consequences. Value violations may bring more severe and lasting problems for marginalized and vulnerable end-users of apps, which have been explored less (if at all) in the software engineering community. One of the main reasons behind value violations is the lack of understanding of human values due to their ill-defined, ambiguous, and implicit nature. Furthermore, addressing all the values of the end-users in a single app might cause dissatisfaction for some of the end-users if they have different values. Therefore, it is essential to identify if there are different groups of end-users of apps who share similar values and develop different sets of apps design strategies accordingly, which is the essential first step towards values-based apps development. This research aims to fill this gap by investigating different groups of Bangladeshi female farmers as a marginalized and vulnerable group of end-users of Bangladeshi agriculture apps based on their values. We conducted an empirical study that collected and analyzed data from a survey with 193 Bangladeshi female farmers to explore the underlying factor structure of Bangladeshi female farmers' values and the significance of demographics on their values. The results identified three underlying factors of Bangladeshi female farmers. The first factor comprises of five values: benevolence, security, conformity, universalism, and tradition. The second factor consists of two values: self-direction and stimulation. The third factor includes three values: power, achievement, and hedonism. We also identified strong influences of demographics on some of the values of Bangladeshi female farmers. For example, area has significant impacts on three values: hedonism, achievement, and tradition. Similarly, there are also strong influences of household income on power and security. The results provide a direction for Bangladeshi agriculture app developers to develop different sets of apps design strategies for different groups of Bangladeshi female farmers based on their values. (c) 2023 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.