Separating the Wheat from the Chaff in Internet-Mediated User Feedback

Abstract

The Internet enables cheap, rapid, and large-scaledistribution of software for evaluation purposes. It alsopresents hitherto unprecedented, and currently underutilized,opportunities for increasing user-developer communicationin software development. For instance, the Internet can beused as a medium for collecting "direct" user feedback in theform of subjective user reports, as well as "indirect"feedback in the form of automatically-captured data aboutapplication and user behavior. Both of these practices,however, face a number of challenges that can besummarized in the following statement: there is morefeedback to be collected --- ranging in quality from useful touseless --- than there is time and resources to sift through andact upon the meaningful parts. This paper describes anInternet-based approach for capturing user feedback --- both"direct" and "indirect" --- that attempts to address thisproblem by focusing feedback collection based on the notionof "usage expecta...