Smart Elicitation of User Feedback in Mobile Applications

Abstract: Context. Nowadays, mobile applications and services have occupied an essential part in our daily life. We use them to fulfill our needs for communication, news, or entertainment. Within a fierce competitive market, mobile applications need continually improvement through collections of user feedback to satisfy users’ needs. However, in mobile applications, lack of a comprehensive consideration in designing feedback mechanism makes it difficult to efficiently collect user feedback. It shows only approximate one third online user reviews that contain helpful information for improvement. In addition, users may be disturbed by feedback request, result in rejecting to provide feedback. Objectives. This study aims to provide a comprehensive consideration for elicitation of user feedback in mobile applications. Methods. This study followed a mixed qualitative-quantitative research approach. Firstly, we conducted an experiment and a semi-structured interview to investigate how do users provide feedback when they are using a mobile application. Then a content analysis and a statistical analysis were conducted for analyzing collected data.    Results. Users’ preference of feedback approaches and the encouraging/discouraging factors for users to provide feedback were identified. We also assessed user-perceived suitable timings for interruption of feedback request. Conclusions. The result shows, generally, users prefer to provide feedback when asked by feedback request. Three encouraging factors and Three discouraging factors are identified. The beginning of mobile application execution is perceived as best moment for interruption of feedback request. In addition, this study also provides a three-time-dimensions approach for researching disturbances caused by interruption of feedback request as well as other peripheral information.