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Lin, Jinglan

Engaging users is a challenging task for the producers of mobile applications. In some cases the survival of companies is dependent on the number of users that use their applications on a regular basis. In this paper, we investigate whether the introduction of social communities affect user participation rate of a crowd‐source mobile application. We propose a research model based on the social influence theory to explain the connection between social community and user motivation and then describe the mobile application we designed and implemented for our evaluation. We deployed this application to a number of users toward measuring the effect of social community features on user participation. While we were not able to validate our model in our evaluation, we have outlined a detailed critique of our experiment and several lessons learned that should benefit continued research in this area. The social communities should include a minimum number of members in them in order to foster a real community. Furthermore, participants should be involved in the creation of these communities in order to feel a greater sense of group goals. Future studies should also take into account the difference in usability factors of the two versions of application.

Text

University of British Columbia. EECE 496

Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library

10.14288/1.0103308

Applied Science, Faculty of; Electrical and Computer Engineering, Department of

Unreviewed

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/ca/