Can App Reviews Help Developers to Improve Mobile User Interface Design?

For mobile user interface (M-UI) design, it has an important impact on app user’s usage. However, M-UI design is limited by subjective factors, even professional developers can’t determine whether the M-UI design is good or bad. App reviews provide an opportunity to proactively collect user complaints and promptly improve the user experience of apps. Therefore, it is meaningful to explore whether app reviews can help developers to improve M-UI design. In this article, we randomly select six different categories of apps from Google Play Store and App Store, with over 160000 reviews, and conduct a preliminary empirical study to answer the question. Specially, we gather M-UI-related reviews, and compare the average rating of M-UI-related reviews and total reviews of each app. We observe that the M-UI is concerned by users and the average rating for M-UI-related reviews is lower than the average rating for total reviews. By extracting the topics of M-UI-related reviews, we estimate the sentiment of the M-UI-related topics. The results show that the number of M-UI-related topics are about three or four, and the sentiment of M-UI-related topics is related to the app itself. Further, by investigating the relation between the M-UI-related topics and M-UI design. We observe that users are concerned about the M-UI usability the most, and it is the various aspects of the M-UI that are causing user frustration. In particular, our findings show that M-UI-related reviews reflect the severity of M-UI-related issues and app reviews can help developers to improve M-UI design about appearance, usability, fault-tolerance, of which usability deserves the most attention.