Analysis of Personal Data Visualization Reviews On mHealth Apps (short paper)
This addresses user experience gaps in mHealth apps for non-expert users, but it is incremental as it builds on existing app review analysis methods.
The paper analyzed user reviews of data visualizations in 250 mHealth apps, finding 8,406 related comments with 5,930 positive, 1,557 negative, and 919 neutral, and identified functional requirements as the most common problem.
Mobile devices, specifically, smartphones proved easy and quick access to data visualisations throughout various tracking apps. Mobile health (mHealth) apps have given non-expert users access to data visualisation to track their activities and health-related issues such as heart tracking and medication. However, no work is done on user experience or perception of data visualisations in mHealth apps. App reviews offer an indirect anchor for researchers to examine how non-expert users perceive and interact with data visualisations and identify the key challenges and recommendations. This paper introduces an analysis of app reviews on data visualisations reported on a dataset of 250 mHealth apps on the Google Play Store. We identified 8,406 comments related to data visualisations. 919 neutral comments, 1,557 negative comments and 5,930 positive comments. From analysing the user reviews, functional requirements turned out to be the most common problem across these app reviews, followed by the look and feel and then data problems. A complete set of data visualisations seem to be the most well-received capability of mHealth apps. We used these comments to develop classification and data visualisation guidelines when developing mobile data visualisations.