How Much Context Do Users Provide in App Reviews? Implications for Requirements Elicitation.

People post millions of app reviews on Google Play and Apple’s App Store, but developers can struggle to incorporate this feedback in human-centered design processes. Although researchers have developed automated techniques to gather requirement information, including bug reports and feature requests, for developers tasked with app updates, these methods overlook contextual details in app reviews that explain why users encounter problems and offer insight into new design possibilities. However, prior research has not described the relative availability and characteristics of requirement and context information provided by users in app reviews. To address this gap in the literature, this study performs a content analysis of reviews of Citizen, a personal safety app, to show that users often include rich, contextual details about where, why, and how they use Citizen , but rarely discuss explicit requirements that most automated requirements elicitation techniques attempt to gather from app reviews. These findings suggest opportunities to scale human-centered design processes by collecting and classifying contextual details in app reviews to summarize use case scenarios that can provide rationales for app updates and inspire ideas for the design of new features and products.