FAVe: Visualizing User Feedback for Software Evolution

Abstract

App users can submit feedback about downloaded apps by writing review comments and giving star ratings directly in the distribution platforms. Previous research has shown that this type of feedback contains important information for software evolution. However, in the case of the most popular apps, the amount of received feedback and its unstructured nature can produce difficulties in its analysis. We present an interactive user feedback visualization which displays app reviews from four different points of view: general, review based, feature based and topic-feature based. We conducted a study which visualized 2009 reviews from the Dropbox app available in the App Store. Participants considered the approach useful for software evolution tasks as they found it could aid developers and analysts get an overview of the most and least popular app features, and to prioritize their work. While using different strategies to find relevant information during the study, most participants came to the same conclusions regarding the user reviews and assigned tasks.