The way it made me feel - Creating and evaluating an in-app feedback tool for mobile apps

Abstract

Mobile apps are becoming increasingly important in everyone's daily life. The success of an app is linked to high user acceptance. Therefore, it is necessary to capture users' expectations, needs, and problems regarding an app in any situation. By continuously capturing and analyzing user feedback, developers can evaluate the level of user acceptance. There are various feedback channels, such as app stores, social networks, and within the app, which can be used to capture user feedback. As we already have experience with feedback from app stores and social networks, we wanted to investigate inapp feedback approaches and thus conducted a mapping study to understand the state of the art of these approaches.We analyzed 36 publications and derived requirements for in-app feedback tools. Based on that, we defined requirements for an in-app feedback tool to describe its prototypical realization. Then we performed an evaluation regarding user acceptance of our tool with 33 participants. The evaluation showed a high rate of acceptance for the tool among the participants. The results also highlighted improvement areas for our tool, such as optimizing the rate of requests for feedback. We plan to address these aspects in future work and to continue improving our tool.