USERS’ OPINION ON THE MOBILE APPLICATIONS FOR THE INTEGRATED MANAGEMENT OF POMEGRANATE AND OLIVE FRUIT CROPS

Abstract

A survey was designed and administered on a sample of fruit growers to identify their perceptions and experience with the newly developed E-extension mobile application for Pomegranate and Olive. This was achieved through investigating a number of related sub-objectives covering some dimensions of the mobile application including: 1) Identify the opinion of the respondents on the degree of easiness in using the mobile application as an extension method. 2) Identify the opinion of respondents regarding the quality of the agricultural information loaded on the applications. 3) Identify the opinion of the respondents regarding the quality of the pictures and videos of the applications. 4) Identify the respondents' willingness to recommend the mobile applications to others. 5) Identify the users’ suggestions of other crops that need to develop mobile applications for them.The data were collected from users of the integrated management mobile applications for Pomegranate and Olive. Two simple random samples were drawn using the Krejcie & Morgan formula. The sizes of the samples were 227 users of the Pomegranate mobile application, and 239 users of the Olive mobile application respectively. Data were collected through personal interview using a pretested questionnaire during September 2020. Percentages, frequencies, mean and standard deviation, were used for data presentation in the findings. The main results showed that, regarding the opinion of the respondents on the quality of the pictures and videos of the applications, the majority of the Pomegranate application users 72.2% are concentrated in the high rating category, against 61.5% of the Olive application users. Regarding the respondents' willingness to recommend the mobile applications to others, it was found that the majority of the Pomegranate application users (82.8%) in the high rating category. Also, according to the questioner, Watermelon, then Mango and Guava were selected by respondent to apply within E-Extension. These results indicated that the mentioned applications were useful for their users.