A Usable and Secure Crime Reporting System for Technology Resource Constrained Context

Crime in technology resource constrained environments has been shown to adversely affect economic growth by deterring investment and triggering emigration. To address this secure reporting channels are being investigated to encouraging anonymous crime reporting. In this paper, we present a system (Cry Help App) developed to enable residents of a university community situated in technology resource constrained environment to facilitate secure and covert crime reporting. We focus primarily on the usability of the application. The system was developed on the basis of user centric iterative approach. Deployment and evaluation results of our prototype system demonstrate that overall the system scored a 77.06% usability rating with a standard deviation of 0.05 for contributing scores on System Use, Information Quality and Interface Quality. This is indicative of the fact that users found the system to be very usable.