Separating the wheat from the chaff in Internet-mediated user feedback expectation-driven event monitoring

ABSTRACT

The Internet enables cheap, rapid, and large-scale distribution of software for evaluation purposes. It also presents hitherto unprecedented, and currently underutilized, opportunities for increasing user-developer communication in software development. For instance, the Internet can be used as a medium for collecting "direct" user feedback in the form of subjective user reports, as well as "indirect" feedback in the form of automatically-captured data about application and user behavior. Both of these practices, however, face a number of challenges that can be summarized in the following statement: there is more feedback to be collected -- ranging in quality from useful to useless -- than there is time and resources to sift through and act upon the meaningful parts. This paper describes an Internet-based approach for capturing user feedback -- both "direct" and "indirect" -- that attempts to address this problem by focusing feedback collection based on the notion of "usage expectations" in the development process.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  K. Computing Milieux
  K.6 MANAGEMENT OF COMPUTING AND INFORMATION SYSTEMS
      K.6.3 Software Management
          Subjects: Software development

Additional Classification:
  D. Software
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
      D.2.5 Testing and Debugging
          Subjects: Monitors

  H. Information Systems
  H.3 INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL
      H.3.5 On-line Information Services
          Subjects: Web-based services
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)

General Terms:
Design, Human Factors, Management, Performance

Keywords:
Internet-mediated user-developer communication, expectation-driven event monitoring, remote usability evaluation, user feedback