Mobile Apps for Gathering Research Data
In the recent 5 years, the mobile industry has grown tremendously. At the center of that growth was Apple’s App Store for smartphones. What made the App Store so effective and even revolutionary was that it connected consumers to a one-stop place for every (non-jailbreak) app ever created for the iPhone. There was no need for consumers to search the net to download applications from different sources. In another words, Apple had monopoly over its customers (and developers) and they perceived it as good.
This trader monopoly created a massive global network for developers and consumers. This network is an active network with full of user interaction (reviews and feedback), allowing developers to distribute their ideas quickly and efficiently. This global, strongly connected network provides new opportunities for researchers to gain wealth of data through applications. A study done by a group in Dartmouth College discusses the gains and the pitfalls of using the App Store and mobile applications to gain research data.
According to the group, mining research data via mobile applications allowed the group to gain data from a much larger group of people with many and various backgrounds which were not available before, the benefits of a large, connected network. Unlike other human-subject experiments, the data gained through this method allows researchers to gain a constant flow flow data. Moreover, this method is “free” — the researchers do not have to pay each subject, allowing larger and more comprehensive data sets.
There were, however, downsides as well to this method, such as hardware and software updates, user-incentives, and app usability. Unlike an obligated research experiment, users are free to stop using the application. The main pitfall of this method is that it is easy to remain unconnected to the massive network created by the App Store. Applications are heavily dependent on user feedback and reviews. Feedback and reviews on the app are highly visible in the app download page. Apps with low ratings are often rejected for that reason. In addition to the App Store, negative user reviews on blog posts create a negative reputation of the application and turn positive links between the users and the developer to negative links, leading to isolation in the network. In this sense, this method could be the most expensive way to gather data, because the man-hours spent on developing may harvest very few data.
Conclusively, with growing demand for human-computer interaction research, gathering data via a mobile application seems like an attractive method for gathering research data. However, researchers must be able to execute it in a fun and engaging fashion and be aware of network isolation from many possible negative-link-creators. There are opportunities here, but sometimes, the harvest may be less than what is sown.
Emiliano Miluzzo, Nicholas Lane, Hong Lu, Andrew T. Campbell. Research in the App Store Era: Experiences from the CenceMe App Deployment on the iPhone, In Proc. of The First International Workshop Research in the Large: Using App Stores, Markets, and other wide distribution channels in UbiComp research,September 26, 2010, Copenhagen, Denmark. [pdf]