Tinesh Narendra Shah

Improving the Feedback System by Enhancing User Experience and Gathering Quality Information on Mobile Devices

Our growing dependency on smartphones has caused an upsurge in the creation of a new class of software i.e., smartphone apps. Millions of users use these apps every day. Most of them are frequently updated by the developers to provide a better user experience by integrating additional features, which at times result in the instability of the Apps. Users having no technical knowledge face many usability issues when using these apps. Such apps also have certain flaws in terms of how they appear, the functionalities they provide and how a user interprets it. In-situ feedback is collected from the end users on Play Stores or from the app itself for improving the UX. For these usability issues, it is noted that the knowledge of the feedback reporting activity and the way the interface of feedback system designed is inadequate.

A paper by Oh et al. reports about the user study conducted to know how users report usability issues that they come across when interacting with mobile applications. The study recognized the feedback reporting behavior of users that helped in identifying various characteristics of usability issues. The idea thus forms a base, which is used in helping the end users with an organized and efficient way to provide extensive feedback about the issues they face using appropriate methods.

This thesis is the extension of the above idea. The goal is to develop a feedback system constituting of feedback app and a desktop app  that integrates all the identified characteristics of usability issue attributes and at the same time put into operation various UI guidelines that could make the functioning of the app easy and delightful and at the same time helps developers in identifying and managing the reported concern.